


Mesmeria

by rohkeutta



Series: Mesmeria [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Identity Porn, Implied/Referenced Torture, Inspired by a Movie, M/M, POV Sam Wilson, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Stucky Big Bang 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-07-26 01:05:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 31,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7554244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohkeutta/pseuds/rohkeutta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dreamsharing world is basically just a bunch of gossip-loving loudmouths, so Sam has heard a lot about Steve Rogers - a genius, a madman, a miracle of modern science. But joining his extraction team turns out to be something that no rumour can describe.</p><p>What was supposed to be an everyday dream heist from a high-up politician turns out to be a vendetta against a crime lord, and somewhere during the four years since the Moscow job Steve Rogers has gotten himself a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PART ONE

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 한국어 available: [Mesmeria (한국어 번역)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9235481) by [yuhnc27](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuhnc27/pseuds/yuhnc27)



> Welcome to my Stucky Big Bang 2016 fic! The incredible art in the second part is by amazing [misspaperjoker](http://misspaperjoker.tumblr.com). 
> 
> This is 40 % Inception fic, 20 % shameless ode to my favourite countries, 20 % a love song to Bucky Barnes, and 20 % a ridiculous chance to promote Finland. Visitfinland.com should probably pay me for all this gratuitious advertising I do.
> 
> HUGE thanks to my beta [sneaqui](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sneaqui/pseuds/sneaqui), who patiently and without mercy cut my overly long sentences, patiently dealt with my comma misuse, corrected my Finnishisms, and offered superb advise. Thanks also to jin and Helene who gave precious insights on the plot; Lys and Fox for cheering me on; and the whole Lion King Crotch Pocket chat (still not letting that name go) just for gals being pals and bros being wows or something.
> 
> Mesmeria is an album by Finnish band called CMX.
> 
> Just a reminder: in Inception's world, one can prematurely exit a dream by killing themselves. There are a couple of occassions where a person shoots themselves to achieve that.

The wind feels a little like a hairdryer on the warmest setting. Sam hates it.

He’s been squinting down at the Google Maps directions on his phone for the past ten minutes, sweating under the sun and cursing Red Hook and its lack of proper public transportation. It says a lot about a neighbourhood when one of the most convenient ways to reach it is by the goddamn IKEA ferry.

But Steve Rogers is a Brooklyn boy and makes the rules, so here Sam is, trodding past the run-down little houses with sweat dripping down his asscrack. Seriously, all the fucking things he does for a job. But he’s been out of the game since Jamaica and Riley, and he _needs_ this job to get back on track and pay his mortgage. If it requires getting lost in Red Hook, so be it.

The first thing Sam notices about Steve Rogers is the way he’s conveniently standing under the only shadowing tree on the street. He’s a big guy, a little taller and broader than Sam, but his posture is strange, slightly stilted. His spine is straight and his weight distributed evenly between his feet - clearly ex-military. But his huge shoulders are hunched, like he’s trying to make himself smaller, less conspicuous.

He’s either trying to get heatstroke or blend into the wall: his khakis and the red plaid button-up make him look like someone’s grandpa instead of a ridiculously hot guy in his early thirties who’s built like a brick shithouse. There’s even something old-fashioned about his neat hair, and - had he looked like he’d spared any thought to his outfit when putting it on - Sam might have mistaken him for a hipster. But he carries the out-of-style clothes and haircut too naturally and unselfconsciously, and when Sam looks him in the eye, he realizes that the outfit isn’t the only odd thing about Rogers.

Sam has heard a lot of things about Rogers, most of them describing him as either a genius or a madman or both. To Sam, he looks young and vulnerable, and it’s surprising, since this man is supposed to be the best extractor in the world. Hell, this man was the first dream-trained soldier, and he looks like he’s carrying the whole planet on his shoulders.

Sam knows about the Moscow job, of course, but that was over four years ago, and that doesn’t explain why Steve Rogers looks tired and about a hundred years old.

“I’ve heard good things about you through the grapevine, Wilson,” Rogers says as he shakes Sam’s hand. His voice is deeper than Sam expected it to be. “But I’d still like to see you in action.”

“Sure thing,” Sam promises. “And you can call me Sam, man, really. Natasha briefed me on the job in her email. Anything more you can tell me?”

Rogers leads them further towards the sea, pulls out a key, and opens the door of an abandoned-looking red-brick warehouse. The stairs are old and a little rickety, and for a brief moment Sam fears for his life, but the second floor of the warehouse has been renovated somewhat during the past decade and turned into a workshop. It’s identical to most dreamshare workshops Sam’s seen: there are deck chairs, huge desks, a miniature lab space, a wi-fi router, and even a full-length mirror in case they need to bring in a forger.

Rogers keeps quiet until they get inside and close the door. Then a smile flits across his mouth. “Sam, call me Steve. The mark is Alexander Pierce, Secretary of the World Security Council. He’s been secretly running a human trafficking ring for several years. We need the names of his accomplices.” He glances briefly at Sam and continues. “Once we get the information we need from him, I’m going to kill him.”

Rogers’ voice is calm, and Sam stops short. “Excuse me?”

Steve looks him in the eye and says evenly, “I have my reasons. It won’t affect the job.”

Sam narrows his eyes, but nods. The Moscow job is the only one of Rogers’ known extractions that went terribly wrong, and Sam can’t think of any other reason for him to thirst for a vendetta. From what he’s heard, Rogers - Steve - isn’t the sort of guy to hold a grudge, but Barnes’ death must have been a huge blow to him. Sam is curious about it, in a perverse way, but there’s no way he can ask Steve about it, so he’ll just have to dig a little to find out more about what happened in Moscow.

Steve puts the PASIV he’s carrying down on a small coffee table between two deck chairs and gestures for Sam to sit down. His PASIV is modified, probably a Mark Seven: sleeker, different layout inside, the machine parts arranged in a more effective order. It’s clearly been remodeled with an engineer’s love, and it’s unmistakably beautiful, even though the case is scuffed and dull.

“I’ll put five minutes on the clock,” Steve tells him, offering him the IV. “Build anything you’re comfortable with. I’ll fill the dream.”

Sam nods, IV in place, and Steve presses the button.

\----

The party is nice; nicer than Steve ever remembers attending in real life - and he’s been paraded through many political ass-kissing dinners. He wanders around, occasionally mingling with his own projections, checking out the subtle twists of the layout, nodding his approval at the top-notch Penrose staircase circling the ballroom. Sam's work is excellent, and Steve is scanning the crowd to find and tell the man himself, when the world around him seems to stop abruptly and his heart skips a beat in his chest.

There's Sam, laughing with a man who’s wearing a dark blue summer suit. It's a beautiful suit: the cut sweeping adoringly down from broad shoulders to a tapered waist, hugging every breathtaking curve of the man's ass and impossibly long legs, all the way down to his expensive Italian shoes. It's a gorgeous suit, and Steve remembers stripping it off slowly, piece by piece, in another dream, a lifetime ago.

He makes his way to them, heart hammering in his throat, and then Bucky turns, steps closer to put his hand on Steve's waist and drawls in a low voice, smirk curling the corner of his mouth, "Well, if it ain't the devil himself. You tried to go to this fancy party without me, Steve?"

Behind Bucky Sam's eyes widen in alarm as he mouths silently _What?_ and Steve thinks, _Oh no._

Steve looks down and then slowly up, from Bucky's shiny shoes to his chest, at his dark red silk tie and pretentious silver pin in the shape of Lady Liberty’s profile.

He remembers vividly the 2008 Phnom Penh job and the wiry, overly-patriotic American banker Bucky had been impersonating then. He remembers sweating his ass off in their hotel room: it was close to Christmas, and December in Cambodia was hotter and more humid than Steve was used to. Bucky had been gliding around in front of a mirror, mimicking the way the banker walked, talking bullshit to himself in an unfamiliar yet impeccable Midwestern accent.

Steve had followed Bucky down into the dream where Bucky had stood in front of a mirror for a long time, wearing the face and body of the banker, testing how the gestures he’d practiced worked in the dream. It had been an almost flawless imitation down to the exact angle of the banker's angry, slanted eyebrows. It had been a perfect forge because it wasn’t, not actually: the left shoe was slightly scuffed while the right one was polished, and his cufflinks were mismatched.

Bucky had turned away from the mirror then, and his face had been his own again, handsome and familiar, and his body had been his own inside that beautiful, beautiful suit. When he’d sauntered over to Steve, he’d walked like Bucky did, easy and incredible and so damn talented. And Steve had finally pulled his head out of his ass and kissed him, ending a ten-year-long push and pull he’d been so keen to keep up as a buffer between them.

It's been seven and seventy years since that job, and yet it’s no surprise that Steve’s mind still keeps coming back to Bucky wearing that suit.

"I wasn't aware that you were invited," Steve replies, clearing his throat.

Bucky's eyes glint; he’s mad and dangerous and really shouldn't make Steve breathless. His tie pin has shifted into the shape of Steve’s old Project Oneiros shield.

"Oh no, sweetheart," Bucky grins, sharp and feral, “I always am. _He_ wasn’t.”

In the blink of an eye he has a gun in his hand, pointing it back at Sam. The shot cracks like a bullwhip through the ballroom, and Sam falls, a hole in his forehead and the back of his skull blown out.

"So, baby," Bucky says, his Beretta clattering down to the floor, his touch burning through the fabric on Steve's hips, the madness in his eyes like a night terror, "wanna dance?"

Bucky looks almost disappointed when Steve presses the gun against his own head and pulls the trigger, shooting himself out of the dream.

When Steve wakes up, Sam is staring at him from the next chair over. Sam’s eyes are narrowed, assessing, and then he says in a flat voice, utterly devoid of any possible judgement, "You have a ghost."

"Yeah," Steve sighs, "it seems so."

"And you didn't tell me because...?"

A muscle ticks in Steve’s jaw. "Because it was a test."

Sam looks at him coolly. "Who is he?"

Steve turns away, gets up, and starts spooling the tubes. The memory of Bucky’s hands still lingers, the imprints of a ghost. "Bucky."

"Bu--"

Steve almost hears the moment when it clicks and Sam gets it.

"Bucky as in Barnes? Bucky as in Is-that-a-first-or-a-last-name-No-it’s-just-Barnes?"

Steve nods, not looking at him. They’re quiet for a long time while Steve packs the PASIV up.

Then, Sam says, "I never met him, but I heard about him, of course. I mean, everyone in this business has heard about him and his forges. He was legendary. He was one of the pioneers of forging, right?"

Steve swallows, clicks the lock of the PASIV case closed, and grabs the handle.

"No," he replies, his voice suddenly rough and catching in his throat, "he was the first."

He turns to go. "If you still want the job, it's yours. We meet here tomorrow at 8 a.m. If not, it was good meeting you.”

Steve is almost at the door when Sam's voice floats across the room, "You were in Project Oneiros together." It's not a question.

"Yeah," Steve answers anyway.

"I'm in," Sam says.

\----

Steve's teammates are a little weird, a little terrifying, and possibly just as mad as he is. Sam meets them the next morning: Natasha is on point, Bruce provides the Somnacin, and Clint - if his bragging about himself is to be trusted - runs the best interference in the Western Hemisphere.

Tony Stark - a guy Sam is more used to seeing on TMZ - comes and goes as he pleases, and it turns out that Steve has worked for him in the past. There aren’t many people with companies as large as Tony’s that haven’t paid someone to break into their rivals’ minds. Tony used to manufacture weapons for several of the world’s armies; a job like that brings enemies.

In the past couple of years, Stark Industries has instead started producing high-quality appliances and advanced medical technology using clean energy. But Tony’s fame comes mostly from his huge, glittering parties, full of Playboy girls and film stars, where alcohol and drugs flow freely.

When someone has as much money as Tony does, it’s easy to forget that underneath all that wealth is a normal human being. Tony is loud-mouthed, sometimes annoying, and likes to “tinker” with PASIVs in his free time, but it’s plain to see that he has a big heart underneath his bravado. There has to be a sentimental reason why he’s funding Steve’s revenge road trip, since Sam can’t spot any obvious business reasons for Tony Stark to go after Alexander Pierce.

Maybe it’s because Barnes left such an impression on Tony. When Steve isn’t close by, Tony talks about Barnes’ dry wit and great fashion sense in a hushed voice. He plays it off as small talk, but Sam can see that Tony genuinely liked Barnes and was upset by his death.

Steve’s team must be the craziest bunch of assholes Sam’s ever worked with. (Bruce seems to be the only normal guy around, but he's practically cooking drugs, so Sam just counts him in.) Apparently, this particular bunch makes up Steve’s most frequently-assembled team nowadays - since his days of pulling two-man jobs with Barnes are over - and it’s plain to see from the way they interact.

They have a truly generous amount of time in which to plan and prepare for the extraction. Alexander Pierce is doing his yearly two-month-long world tour, during which he visits charities and non-governmental organizations, kisses babies, and does whatever evil overlords disguised as peace ambassadors do. He isn’t due back in D.C. until late October. It’s the end of August now, and Sam is thankful for the pushed-back deadline. The preparation for this job isn’t going to be easy, with Steve’s fraying mental health and the fact that they need to get past shitloads of security to get to Pierce.

"Do you know about Rogers' ghost?" Sam asks Natasha, two days into the job, when they’re taking a break and Steve has gone out to grab some proper coffee.

She nods. "He’s been lurking in Rogers’ mind for over two years. I met the real Barnes very briefly on the job that killed him, in 2011. He seemed like a ruthless guy, although he clearly tried to hide it from Rogers. His ghost seems… a lot less concerned about that."

"What was the deal with them?"

Natasha shrugs, her red ponytail bobbing. She’s tapping her short, electric blue nails against the smooth surface of her tablet, effortlessly multitasking on a level that Sam will never reach. Sam likes her no-nonsense attitude and the downright scary, flat look she can level at Stark when he gets on everybody’s nerves.

"Partners,” she says. “Brothers-in-arms. Best friends for twenty years. Star-crossed lovers. Who really cares anymore, now that Barnes is dead and Rogers is falling apart?"

Sam looks at her, tilts his head to the side, and considers that for a moment. Then, he says, “It’s getting worse.”

Natasha sighs a little. “I know. The ghost has been getting crueler lately.” She purses her lips, clearly considering whether to elaborate or not. Then she says, “Rogers is running purely on the thought of avenging Barnes with this job. I was with them on the Moscow job, where we were supposed to extract information about this same trafficking ring. Before we even had a proper plan, someone tipped Pierce off and his goons attacked us. Barnes stayed behind to place the explosives in the veterinary clinic we used as a base, and got blown up. Rogers almost got himself killed too. I'm hoping for a better outcome to this job."

Sam's eyebrows are steadily climbing towards the ceiling. "Yeah, I can see why."

Natasha shakes her head. "I have no idea how Rogers is still hanging on. I’m considering putting a bullet in his brain myself after this job is done, unless he gets there first. It would be an act of kindness, at this point. Rogers had himself blown to pieces with Barnes.”

They’re silent for a minute or so. Then, Clint appears practically out of nowhere and leans against Natasha’s desk. “Barnes wasn’t haunting Steve’s dreamspace for over eighteen months after he died,” he informs them. “But then something happened, and suddenly Barnes is everywhere, sometimes wearing someone else’s face. What I wanna know is _why_? Where the hell did he come from?”

None of them know the answer, and when Steve and Bruce come back, they all drift back to their own corners.

\----

"We need a forger," Steve says that night, clearly reluctant. "The best we can find. There really isn't any other way this job can work in our favour."

Natasha twirls her pen. "I know a guy who knows a guy," she says thoughtfully. "Yasha. Russian, mostly takes jobs in Europe but might be willing to travel if the price is right. From what I've heard, he's one of the best and can be hired on short notice. Give me a couple of days."

\----

Three days later, Steve walks into the warehouse and sees a ghost.

Bucky’s standing in front of the whiteboard, taking in the notes. His back is towards Steve, but the slope of his shoulders is familiar, and Steve fumbles for his totem. But this is real. He’s not dreaming.

Bucky turns when he hears Steve's footsteps stop, and-- Steve knows he’s in a bad shape, all right? He _knows_. But this is ridiculous. The guy does look a little like Bucky, if Bucky had three days worth of stubble, and something metallic peeking out from beneath the wide boat neck of a long-sleeved shirt. If Bucky wore his hair long and pulled back into a bun, black-rimmed glasses, and _if he were still alive_ \- which he’s not.

The last time Steve saw him, in July 2011, Bucky was short-haired and clean-shaven and American - and being blown to smithereens along with an abandoned veterinary clinic in Moscow.

Steve shouldn't be standing here, his heart trying to hammer its way out of his chest just because there’s a man who bears some resemblance to Bucky and Steve’s decided to project his grief onto him.

"Hi," the man says, his voice soft. "I am Yasha. Natasha let me in."

His accent is Russian, but just slightly, and that shakes Steve out of his trance long enough to shake his hand. Yasha is tall and lean, broad-shouldered and tanned, like he’s spent most of the summer outside. In this light his eyes look the same shade of pale blueish grey that Bucky’s were.

“Glad you came,” he manages. “I'm Steve Rogers. Your workspace is by the window, where the mirror is.”

Yasha nods, and hooks some loose, dark locks behind his ear with his left hand. Steve follows the movement helplessly, watches Yasha’s sleeve fall down to his elbow.

Yasha's left arm is a cybernetic prosthetic. It’s unnervingly real-looking, with curves of muscles, perfectly-shaped joints, and surprisingly nimble fingers. The plates covering it move with the faintest whirring when he curls his fingers. It’s incredibly advanced; Steve’s never seen anything even close to it, and he’s watched Tony strut around in one of the exoskeleton suits he likes to build.

Steve stares at it, long enough to be creepy, until Yasha clears his throat, and he startles. “Sorry,” he stammers. “That’s-- that’s a really good prosthetic.”

Yasha’s smile is small and not at all genuine, as if Steve’s made him uncomfortable by pointing out his hand. “Thanks. I lost my arm in an accident a couple of years ago. It’s hooked to my brain.”

He flexes his hand as if to prove a point, and it reflects the lights dully.

“Uh-huh,” Steve says, forcing himself to turn away and head to his own desk. He can feel Natasha’s piercing look drilling into his back from the other side of the room. He hadn’t even realized she was present, and feels like an idiot. The last thing he wants is to alienate their new forger within the first ten minutes, and now he’s managed to not only put a foot in his mouth, but he’s also let Natasha witness his floundering. “Cool.”

Yasha snorts softly behind him and then makes his way silently to the corner of the room. Steve watches him from the corner of his eye. Yasha’s head is high and his gait is smooth and relaxed, well-balanced despite the arm which must be heavy as hell. For a fleeting moment, he looks so much like Bucky before the Army, young and invincible. Bucky used to walk with that sort of ease, until he went to war and came back with a predator’s stalk and sharp, deadly eyes.

Steve swallows and looks away, a phantom ache in his chest.

\----

After Phnom Penh, they’d driven to Siem Reap, because Bucky was a nerd and had wanted to see the ruins of Angkor for the third time.

The car they’d rented was a huge, new Lexus, way too flashy for their tastes and the only car they could find on short notice. But it had air-conditioning, so they weren’t complaining.

Steve was driving, and Bucky was stretched out in shotgun, his long legs and bare, clean feet propped up on the dashboard.

Bucky seemed at home here, as he did in every sorry, sweltering corner of the world. Bucky liked the heat and wore it well: his white undershirt and khaki shorts were spotless against his tanned skin. Steve was always sweating like a pig and feeling like he stank even freshly from the shower, but Bucky bloomed. Hell, he even sweated attractively.

When they stopped to buy more bottled water and pineapple, Steve watched as Bucky folded himself neatly, put on his sandals, and slipped out of the car, slim and agile.

When Steve had met Bucky for the first time twenty years ago, in the middle of a cold and grey winter in New York, had he really thought of him as beautiful? Because if Bucky had been beautiful in North America, here he was stunning, bursting with life like Steve had never seen.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Bucky asked him, mouth full of pineapple, as he climbed back in the car and tossed Steve a water bottle.

Steve caught the bottle without taking his eyes off of him, and Bucky quirked one dark eyebrow at him. Bucky was twenty-six and ancient like only the people who had seen war were, and God, Steve was so in love with him that he felt like bursting.

“I love you,” Steve blurted out, because suddenly he had to say it out loud, or the moment would be gone. Bucky’s mouth curled up into a small, pleased smile. He leaned over the handbrake to press a slightly sticky, tingling kiss to Steve’s mouth, careful to not let anyone outside see.

“I’ve loved you for most of my life, asshole,” Bucky said fondly, screwing his water bottle open. “Glad we’re finally on the same page.”

\----

“Pierce is militarized,” Natasha says a couple days after Yasha has arrived, swiping to the next slide, “so we need to take that into account.”

Sam wants to groan a little. Big fucking surprise that a high-end politician is militarized, but one can always hope for the miracle of an easy job.

“I might be able to help with that,” Yasha says. All eyes turn to him, and he shrugs a little. “I was the one who militarized him.”

Steve looks at Yasha as if he’s betrayed him. To hear that a member of your team has previously interacted with the mark is always a little fishy, nevermind that Pierce had Steve’s lover killed. Yasha’s still a mystery to all of them. He may be friendly and unassuming, but he’s very secretive about himself and the jobs he’s pulled. It’s no wonder that Steve’s hackles go up.

“Why?” Steve blurts, his voice rough and a little broken around the edges.

Yasha turns to look at him, and the blank look on his face makes Sam’s skin crawl.

Yasha stops tapping the floor with his left foot, and the line of his body sharpens into attentive, measured stillness that is typical of a soldier or a sharpshooter.

“To stay alive,” he replies in a monotone voice, and Sam has a sudden and slightly unpleasant realization that he knows absolutely _nothing_ about this guy.

Suddenly, the man leaning back in the desk chair doesn’t seem like the mellow, soft-spoken guy he usually appears to be. No forger is who they pretend to be, but it’s completely different to see that underneath the cover of their current forger is just a dark pit full of ghosts.

Then Yasha blinks, shifts slightly, and starts tapping his foot again. The uneasy atmosphere in the warehouse dissolves, and Sam sucks in a breath. He’s suddenly glad of Yasha’s pretence of normalcy, the lid over the shadows.

“I left some gaps in the fence for myself,” Yasha says and leans further back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair. “I thought they might come in handy.”

“What kind of gaps are you talking about?” Steve asks. He looks like he’s trying to regain his footing after Yasha’s revelation.

“Let me show you.” Yasha gets up and goes to the whiteboard, uncaps a pen and starts scribbling. He’s writing with his prosthetic hand. It’s an impressive feat of both ambidextrousness and engineering; Sam watched him write with his right hand not an hour ago. At first, Sam thinks that he has the worst handwriting ever, but then the illegible chicken scratch morphs into strings of beautiful, cursive cyrillic.

“I took some code words they used for base locations and planted them in Pierce’s mind as part of his militarization,” Yasha explains as he writes. A neat list of Russian words appear on the right side of the board, evenly spaced and lined up.

Clint and Steve lean forward in their chairs to peer at them, then turn their expectant faces towards Natasha.

Natasha’s lips move as she reads Yasha’s list silently. Then, she translates it for the rest of the team, “Желание, longing. Ржaвый, rusted. Семнадцать, seventeen. Возвращение на родину, return to the homeland. Добросердечный, kind-hearted. Солдат, soldier.”

Yasha nods and moves the pen to his right hand. He taps the pen against the words and writes the English translations and six numbers under each. “All of these words have a numerical equivalent which should work on any keypad in Pierce’s mind: payphones, cell phones, ATMs, everywhere except the safes where he keeps his most highly-guarded secrets. Think of them as cheat codes you can use to get around Pierce’s subconscious security.”

Clint raises a hand. “How do they actually work?”

Yasha mimes tapping a passcode. “They act as a confirmation that everything is alright, and they keep security away for about twenty minutes in dream time. Just punch one of these codes into any keypad when you go down into a dream. The need depends on the length of the dream, since you can use them only once, that’s why there’s six of them.”

The team looks stunned: Steve’s eyes are huge, and Clint is gaping a little. Sam’s pretty sure his mouth is open too.

Militarization is a piece of cake for anyone who knows enough about dreamsharing, but this level of deliberate, undetected gap-leaving is something only the very best should be able to do. Sam doesn’t know shit about Yasha’s history in dreamshare, but it’s clear from both his forging skills and this trick that he’s experienced and very, very smart.

“How,” Steve says, clearing his throat, “the hell did you manage to do that?”

Yasha’s mouth curves up into a smile, but there’s an ugly edge to it. “I don’t play nicely under pressure.” He writes six other strings of numbers on the left side of the board. They have the same digits as the codes, but in a different order. “Pierce’s mind recognizes these codes as an alarm. When I militarized him, I slipped the other codes in alongside them.”

Clint whistles in admiration. His smile is almost as sharp-edged as Yasha’s. “Steve, I like this guy. Let’s keep him.”

Yasha laughs, then gestures at Natasha’s tablet and says something in Russian. Natasha pulls up a picture of a guy whose face looks like it was carved from stone.

“Brock Rumlow,” Natasha says. “Pierce’s right-hand man and the leader of SHIELD’s STRIKE team. SHIELD is an acronym that stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention - Enforcement and Logistics Division, an intelligence agency with a higher security clearance than the CIA. Pierce’s office is located at the top floor of the SHIELD headquarters in D.C., otherwise known as the Triskelion.”

“Rumlow is very close to Pierce,” Yasha continues and returns to his seat. “He’s been on Pierce’s detail, so it is pretty safe to assume that he knows about Pierce’s side business. We could exploit that.“

“Muh-huh,” Clint agrees, sucking whipped cream from his frappucino with an obscene slurp. Sam has no idea where the hell he found a Starbucks, but he’s envious. “I’ve met Rumlow. He’s a nasty son of a bitch. Wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’s a human trafficker in addition to being overall human garbage.”

Yasha smiles without real mirth. “I agree.”

Steve gets up and flips the whiteboard around. “All right,” he says. “Now that we have a way around Pierce’s subconscious security, it’s time to make this work.”

“I should probably forge Rumlow,” Yasha says. “And if we want to fool Pierce into believing that he’s on his way somewhere, Pierce’s driver might be a good bet, too.”

Clint nods thoughtfully. “What about a good, old-fashioned back-stabbing? We could drop Pierce into another dream and make Rumlow turn against him. Like, if Rumlow decided to orchestrate a coup? And Pierce has to guess which people are turning against him.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “That’s one possibility. Or we could make it out like he has an arranged meeting with someone.”

“Or just put Pierce in a situation where he needs Rumlow to contact someone,” Natasha suggests.

“Clint might have a point,” Yasha says. “Pierce is… fairly arrogant. It’s not totally impossible that Rumlow and some others could be rebelling against him. I am not sure if it’s realistic, though. Rumlow has to be pretty loyal to Pierce if he's been working for him for this long.”

“Okay,” Steve says and writes the ideas down on the whiteboard. “Using Clint’s idea, we could get the names from Pierce himself, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of breaking into the safe.”

“The safe could be in a file cabinet or a digital records archive,” Natasha suggests, “since we’re looking for information about the people instead of the actual operations.”

“Good idea.” Steve writes it down. “I think we should start by checking Rumlow’s background and find out whether he’s still playing Pierce’s game. We can work from there. Yasha, you’ll probably want to shadow him.”

Yasha nods. “I can leave for D.C. tomorrow, if you want.”

Steve shakes his head. “Let’s see what Natasha’s resources turn up with, first.” His mouth turns up into a tiny smile. “Good job with the militarization. Your codes will, hopefully, save us a lot of trouble.”

Yasha shrugs, his expression impassive. Sam’s pretty sure he wants so say something like _would’ve been nice if someone had saved me from that whole fucking trouble too_ , but Yasha stays quiet.

\----

The next morning, Sam comes in to find Natasha arguing on the phone in angry Russian. She waves at Sam, hisses a couple of sentences into the phone, and abruptly hangs up.

“Everything okay?” Sam ventures and drops his backpack on his desk. It’s very early, and the others haven’t arrived yet; Sam’s here because he woke up from a nightmare with Riley’s name on his lips at the asscrack of dawn and couldn’t sleep anymore.

Natasha sighs and rubs her temples. “I’m trying to figure Yasha out. But it’s hard.”

Sam frowns and goes to start coffee. “What do you mean?”

Natasha comes to help him, presumably to allow her to speak quieter, in case someone else comes in without a warning. “Steve’s been a little weird around him, probably because Yasha looks so much like Barnes. I know that it’s impossible for him to actually _be_ Barnes; that explosion couldn’t have left anyone alive, and what I know of Yasha’s history doesn’t put him anywhere near Moscow at the time.”

They’re quiet for a while, working, until the coffee machine splutters into life and Natasha pulls her phone out to remind Clint to bring bagels. Sam’s almost certain she’s not going to continue her story, when she suddenly says, “It was terrible, Sam. People aren’t calling it a shitstorm for nothing.”

He blinks, surprised by the brutal honesty. “Moscow?”

Natasha nods. Her expression is tight and empathic, and Sam feels like he’s being allowed to glimpse under Natasha’s shell for the first time. “Steve and Barnes were so happy right before the job. I’m pretty sure they’d been talking about marriage; afterwards all Steve could say was something about Barnes saying ‘yes’. I hadn’t been in the business for a very long time, but I had heard of them. Working with them was as amazing as I’d been told it would be. And then Barnes died.”

She falls silent. Sam wipes some coffee grounds from the table.

Then Natasha huffs out a frustrated breath and says, “Barnes’ ghost is a little like a photograph. He’s Steve’s version of him, warped by whatever guilt Steve feels about his death. It’s hard for me to remember what Barnes actually looked like, and that makes figuring Yasha out difficult. I’ve been digging a little, but his story checks out.”

The door creaks, and Clint comes in, carrying a paper bag and a tray of smoothies. “Hey,” he says. “What’s with the glum faces?”

“We’re talking about Yasha and Barnes,” Sam replies and snatches up a smoothie as soon as Clint sets them down.

Clint purses his mouth disapprovingly and shoots a look at Natasha. “Can’t you leave the guy alone, Nat? So far the only things connecting him to Barnes are his jawline and his job. Let the guy keep his secrets, since he’s so keen on protecting them.”

Natasha’s jaw tightens. It’s clear that they’ve talked about this before and disagreed. “I just want to understand,” she says. “You know that I like to let people have their secrets, Clint, as long as they don’t do any harm.”

“I really don’t see how Yasha’s secrets can do any more harm than the rest of our team’s,” Clint argues. “He came highly recommended. You know that his identity is legit. What else are you even looking for, Nat? We all have red in our ledgers. I like the guy, and you know that I don’t like many people.”

Natasha opens her mouth like she’s about to snap something, but Clint thrusts a cream cheese and salmon bagel across the table. “Here, have a bagel and drop it. We’ll deal with it if something unexpected pops up. Now, do you have any fucking coffee? Traffic was hell and I don’t want to be pissed off this early.”

Sam points wordlessly towards the coffee maker, and Clint pats him on the shoulder in thanks.

Natasha exhales noisily through her nose, but grabs the bagel and goes back to her station, flipping a file open.

On his way to his desk Clint stops and puts a hand on her shoulder, a silent apology, which she accepts by placing her own hand on top of his and squeezing a little.

Sam figures they’ll be alright.

\----

“You’ve been experimented on,” Bruce says, breaking the silence in the warehouse. Steve looks up from his laptop, assuming Bruce is talking to him, but Bruce isn’t looking at him.

Yasha has just awoken from a dream that was supposed to last twenty minutes. Steve checks his watch; it’s only been seven minutes.

Yasha sighs. “That obvious, huh?” He gets up from the chair and rolls his shoulders. The plates of his metal arm shift in a ripple-like movement.

“Your body just burned through four dream hours’ worth of Somnacin in an hour and a half,” Bruce says dryly. “One tends to notice, working with Steve. He goes through the regular mix of Somnacin in an hour, dream-time; you’re only a little slower.”

Yasha glances at Steve, who shrugs. The serum Steve got back in 2003 enhanced his metabolism so much that his sedatives have to be much more potent. During Project Oneiros, the dreams had to be short or Steve would get kicked out of the dream too soon - back then, it was much more difficult to give just one dreamer a different mixture.

On the jobs he pulled with Bucky, they both used a stronger sedative, because it was easier. They didn’t need a chemist to make them different mixtures, and Bucky was skilled enough to stay alive through anything.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you,” Yasha says to Bruce. “I did not ask for it, so it is sometimes easy to forget about it.”

Bruce waves his hand. “No, it’s alright. I’ll give you the same mixture Steve gets. We’ll dose Pierce with it, too, so that shooting him on the second level will drop him to Limbo. You’ll just have to be careful and not get killed before the kick. The formula is modified to last in Steve’s enhanced system until that.”

Yasha nods. “Sounds reasonable.” He stretches, grabs his jacket and heads for the door. “I am going for a walk. Does anybody want lunch?”

Clint gets up. “Yeah, pal. I’ll join you, if you’re cool with it. I could do with some exercise.” Yasha nods, so Clint pulls on his hoodie and waves at the rest of their team. “Text me what you want, we’ll bring something back.”

Steve nods, and they leave. He can hear Clint’s voice say, “Hey, did I already tell you about the time I was in Bogota?” as they go down the stairs. Then the door closes with a thud, and silence falls.

It’s strange to realize that he’s not the only not-quite-human member of their team. Steve has never met anyone with the same problem with Somnacin, and he’s not sure whether to be grateful or sad. Steve took the serum willingly, but clearly that wasn’t the case with Yasha.

“Well,” Natasha says then, mildly. Her expression is carefully nonchalant. “You two better watch out for Pierce’s security. It’s good that Yasha put those codes in, or you two would be in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Steve says and clears his throat. “We’ll be careful.”

\----

They settle into the rhythm of the job easily. Natasha and Clint collect information, and Bruce comes in every now and then to test his mixes of Somnacin with them. Sam draws endless amounts of blueprints and makes a mess with styrofoam blocks, which slowly drift out from his own desk to random places around the workshop.

Yasha comes and goes; he’s shadowing Brock Rumlow and Claus Spencer, Pierce’s driver, both of which require frequent trips down to D.C. When he’s in the shop, he’s either reading through his files and making notes, or practising in front of the mirror.

Steve’s always been interested in forging. It’s fascinating to watch Yasha repeat and familiarize other people’s gestures or listen to him speak in Spencer’s refined, clipped accent.

Thanks to Bucky, Steve is a lot wiser than some other extractors about the groundwork a good forge needs. Most of the dreamsharing community likes to dismiss forgers as easy riders: they stride in, slap on someone else’s face, and leave a lot richer. But part of being a good forger is an eye for detail - get an accent or a distinctive habit wrong, and the whole job is jeopardized.

Watching Yasha work is a good excuse to take a break, and Steve likes to use it fully. He stretches the kinks out of his back, grabs a snack or a cup of Clint’s terrible coffee, sits back, and enjoys the show.

He’s avoided any jobs with forgers for four years, mostly because none of them were Bucky, but in all honesty, he’s missed seeing a forge take shape before his eyes. It’s clear that Yasha doesn’t play around; he’s competent, intelligent, and very good at his job.

One morning, Yasha opens his mouth and laughs in Rumlow’s low, hoarse chuckle. It’s so accurate and distinctive that Clint whips his head around in alarm, and that’s when Steve finally admits that calling Yasha in was a good decision.

Yasha slips into their team seamlessly, just like Sam: he doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s usually something useful or really, stupidly funny. Yasha is full of dry wit and surprisingly sassy remarks, which means Tony _adores_ him (even though the sentiment isn’t returned).

Yasha isn’t just good at his art, he’s _spectacular_. As much as Steve aches to admit it, he’s even _better_ than Bucky. Yasha is just a hair’s breadth quicker, and - after some rather gruesome, collapsing dreams - seems to have a much higher tolerance for pain in dreamspace than Bucky did. Steve has never seen anyone hold a forge together so well and for so long while bleeding out from several shots to his gut. Steve doesn’t really want to know how he acquired that particular skill.

Sometimes, when they wake up from bad test runs, Yasha’s eyes are haunted and very, very far away. His movements are often fidgety, sometimes unnaturally so: he jiggles his legs, taps his flesh-and-bone-fingers against the table, twitches his mouth as he reads. But Steve has seen him sit like a statue, staring at himself in the mirror when he thinks the warehouse is empty.

Yasha never shares anything about himself, not really, which isn’t surprising given the profession they’re in, but it’s slightly unnerving nonetheless. About the others, Steve knows at least something: that Clint likes reality tv in which British people build extravagant houses, that Natasha drinks disgusting soft drinks because she couldn’t get them as a child in the Soviet Union, and that Bruce does yoga to handle his well-concealed anger issues without having to take excessive amounts of his own drugs. He knows about Sam’s brother-in-arms-and-crime, Riley, who fell to his death from a cliff in Jamaica.

Steve must look like an open book, laid open for all of them to read. He was always digging up other people’s dirt and fighting for justice by exposing frauds and lies, while Bucky was the one keeping secrets. Even Bucky’s military record was so classified that when he got them erased, nobody noticed that one of Project Oneiros’ key players had disappeared from the records.

He was playing roles to the point where nobody but Steve knew who he really was. On the outside Bucky was a chameleon, a charmer, a man with exceptional aim and a wish to see the world burn. But underneath it all, when the nice sweaters and scratched dog tags were stripped away, he was just a tall, strong boy with scarred knees from Brooklyn.

Bucky had crevasses so deep and dark that even Steve couldn’t see the bottom; the war had carved him full of them. Bucky got through the night terrors by himself, after he came back from the war, because the Army didn’t give him leave between his tour in Iraq and his reassignment to Nevada. By the time Steve joined him for Project Oneiros, Bucky was almost the same carefree guy who had left Brooklyn, or at least he pretended very hard to be.

But the dark, hopeless things Bucky had seen and done in the Middle East without Steve were always hiding under his skin. If the Army hadn’t sent Bucky’s ma a message that he’d gone MIA, Steve probably would’ve never found out about the four weeks Bucky had spent as a prisoner of war.

Bucky didn’t tell him, and Steve didn’t ask. But sometimes, just sometimes, it was clear that Bucky was riddled with holes, like someone had kissed him with a shotgun.

Yasha’s pitch-black wells seem deeper but easier to notice in unguarded moments - the ghosts he’s carrying in his head are in his eyes for anyone to see, but they don’t speak a language anyone of them would understand.

\----

“So, what’s the weirdest dream you’ve ever been in?” Sam asks, leaning over from his seat at the head of the table.

“Oh, I’ve got a nice one,” Clint says, his eyes lighting up, and almost knocks his beer over with his elbow. Natasha catches the bottle before it can topple over and rolls her eyes at him. “It had a unicorn,” Clint continues.

They’re in a tiny hole-in-the-wall pub Clint found on one of his Starbucks trips. It’s not far from their workshop, and normally Steve would be nervous about catching unwanted attention, but nobody’s spared them a glance since they came in and got their beers. Steve always manages to forget how nice it is, to be just another group of casually-dressed friends in their thirties. The pub is half-empty but noisy enough to cover their weird conversation.

Earlier today Steve watched Bucky’s ghost drop a building on top of Clint and Yasha, and he felt bad enough about it that he offered to buy beers for everybody. Sam accused Steve of intentionally tricking them into team bonding, but all of them are here, anyway, and clearly having a good time.

Yasha is sitting next to Steve, and the booth is so small that their thighs are pressed together. He’s been quiet for the most of the afternoon, even more fidgety than usually, but now he looks relaxed and a little amused. His metal hand makes a soft _clink-clink_ against his bottle as he taps his finger, but it’s lazy and almost content. Steve likes the sound.

“So,” Clint starts. “It was one of the last jobs I pulled before Steve cajoled me into joining his team. The mark was an actor; he’d starred in a bunch of kids’ tv shows and was accused of paedophilia. We had this fucking insane architect on the job, who thought it’d be great to create Wonderland. So we had Wonderland, but that wasn’t enough, oh no.” He leans closer and points at Yasha. “You ever forged an animal, pal?”

Yasha snorts and pushes his hair out of his face. “Yes, a goddamn golden retriever. It was strange and fucked up, and I never did it again.”

Sam smothers a laugh; the corners of Natasha’s mouth are tugging up. The thought of their sort-of-scary, mysterious coworker having to forge a dog is all kinds of priceless.

Clint looks gleeful. “Well, our batshit forger decided to forge _a talking unicorn_.”

Sam loses his inner battle and collapses on the table in a fit of laughter. “Oh my god, man.”

“I _know_ ,” Clint snickers. “I spent the whole dream trying to hold my laughter and dodging singing forest animals. It was horribly awesome.”

Yasha facepalms, sighs and shakes his head, slow and long-suffering, like he can’t believe there are people that stupid. But he glances to the side and catches Steve’s eye, and Steve can see that he’s smiling under his hand. They grin at each other. Yasha’s denim-clad thigh is very warm against Steve’s.

Sam clears his throat to get their attention. “Yasha? Was the dog dream your weirdest one?”

Yasha looks at him and snorts. “Definitely. I have worked in some pretty mundane dreams.”

Steve knows that none of them really believes that, but they respect Yasha’s secrecy and don’t call him out on deflecting the question.

“I was once in a dream that was designed to look like a Soviet commune,” Natasha says. “Except everybody was having sex in the fields and fooling around in the barns. The mark was a leftist porn star with a degree in Russian history.”

“The communist dream,” Yasha agrees dryly. “A fulfilled five-year plan and an orgy.”

Yasha is the first one to leave: he’s got an early train to D.C. to catch. Steve walks with him to the door and watches him unlock his crappy bicycle from the tree he chained it to.

“Thanks for inviting me,” Yasha says and smiles up at Steve. “I had fun.”

“Thanks for coming.” Steve shrugs, scratches the back of his head. “Sorry again about the dream.”

Yasha shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. But Steve? You have to get rid of that ghost. It will eventually fuck your whole life up.”

Bucky’s ghost has steered pretty clear of Yasha, which is a little weird but understandable; after all, Bucky’s been targeting mostly Steve himself. But Yasha has seen Bucky from afar and been told that the ghost looks a little like him, so that he can recognize it. Steve’s pretty sure Natasha has ordered Yasha to shoot Bucky on sight if he comes close enough.

Steve swallows. “Yeah,” he says, and his voice sounds thick and a little scratchy. “I’m working on it.”

Yasha makes a soft _hm_ sound, but doesn’t press it. He wraps the lock around the bicycle’s handle and swings his leg over the saddle.

“Where’re you heading?” Steve asks, even though he knows that Yasha answering would be a miracle.

But Yasha looks at him, tilts his head, and in a rare show of trust, says, “Vinegar Hill.”

“Oh,” Steve says, taken aback. No wonder Yasha’s on a bicycle - Vinegar Hill is less than four miles away from their workshop. Somehow it’s easy to picture him there, passing the old houses, carrying the rusty bicycle up the stairs to a decrepit, short-term apartment. Steve doesn’t know why the thought makes him sad.

Yasha quirks a smile, then leans over and squeezes Steve’s shoulder with his metal hand. The grip is surprisingly gentle. “Goodnight,” he says softly, turns the bike, and pedals off into the September night.

Steve watches him go.

\----

September turns into October. They’ve set the initial extraction date for Friday, November 6th, since Pierce is returning to the States on the last day of October.

So far things have been running smoothly, but Natasha is concerned about some odd emails and strange money transfers circulated through various offshore accounts. They don’t seem to have anything to do with human trafficking; they lead to scientific equipment, loads of illegal weapons, to crisis areas. It could be nothing, but Natasha is nothing if not thorough, and she’s getting frustrated.

Tony comes in now and then, mainly to talk science with Bruce or show Clint some new tech he’s tinkering with. Steve suspects he gets pretty lonely, up in his tower in Manhattan. Most of the time he’s a welcome distraction, even if he talks more than the rest of them combined.

On the second week of October, Steve comes back from a lunch run with Clint. He’s balancing a stack of take-away boxes, and almost drops everything as soon as he walks through the door.

Yasha’s been on one of his reconnaissance missions again, and Sam’s been with him in D.C. for the past week, getting material for the maze. They got back while Steve and Clint were out getting food, but they aren’t at their usual stations.

Tony’s been bugging Yasha for a look at his arm for weeks, and Yasha seems to have caved, at last. He’s sitting in one of the deck chairs as Tony hovers, pokes, and makes admiring noises while talking non-stop. Yasha is shirtless, and Steve’s gaze is suddenly glued to him, not only because of his sleek, whipcord body, but because of the tattoos.

Yasha’s whole left shoulder is metal, probably to support the weight of the arm, and there’s a fading red star painted on his shoulder. His left flank is tattooed with hyper-realistic plates, gears, and circuit wires that blend into his prosthetic. The effect is jarring: the longer Steve looks, the less human Yasha looks. His right side and some of his back is covered by a watercolor-style cherry tree; loose petals flutter over his skin.

 _I lost my arm in an accident a couple of years back_ , Steve remembers Yasha saying on his first day. His left side has clearly been tattooed to mesh with the arm, and the petals are likely hiding scattered scars. For a long moment, Steve wonders what kind of accident would leave scars that needed such extensive covering.

It doesn’t escape him that Yasha is also very fit and very good-looking underneath his clothes. Steve swallows and tries to dismiss the thought.

“Wow, man,” Sam says loudly as he steps out of the bathroom behind Steve, “those are some sick tattoos.”

Yasha turns to look at them, and a smile ghosts across his face, even though he looks uncomfortable with his shirtlessness. “Thanks, Sam. I can recommend a guy if you ever go to Vyborg.”

“Not likely, but never say never,” Sam muses, laughing. “Where’s Vyborg?”

“Karelia, close to the Finnish border,” Natasha says, not looking up from her laptop. “The train from Moscow to Helsinki runs through it. Used to belong to the Finns before WWII. A decaying town.”

“ _V_ _iipuri! Seisot kuin kallio meressä, seisonut ennen jo tulessa ja veressä; kertoa voivat sun muurisi harmaat isänmaan kohtalot kolkot ja armaat; Viipuri! Et sinä sortua saa. Jos sinä seisot, seisovi maa,”_ Yasha recites, his Russian accent warping amusingly around the flat, monotonous language. They all stare at him a little, and he shrugs. “It’s from a poem by Eino Leino. He wrote it when Vyborg was still Finnish.”

“Huh,” Sam says, eyebrows climbing up. “That’s a lot more information and poetry in funny languages than I expected. You’ve been there, Natasha?”

Natasha smirks at him. “Sorry, classified.”

Clint drops their lunch on the table and strikes a pose like he’s about to strip. “Can I take my shirt off, too? I may not have a metal arm, but I’ve got some sinful tan lines and a twelve-pack, straight from Iowa.” He waggles his eyebrows suggestively at Yasha.

“Unless you’re hiding a twelve-pack of beer under your shirt, I don’t need your nudity, Clinton,” Tony informs him. He looks disappointed when Clint winks and lifts the hem of his shirt to show his flat stomach and the lack of beer.

“I’ll take you up on that offer,” Yasha says, standing up to fetch his henley from his desk. He smirks, lopsided and a little flirty, at Clint, like he’s grateful to Clint for shifting everyone’s attention away from him. “Strip, farm boy, I wanna see where your corn-fed tan ends.”

Steve’s heart does a funny little swoop in his chest. _Shit_ , he thinks as he stares, dumbly. _He likes guys._ Then he realizes how _Bucky_ the whole remark was, and feels a little like crying.

Sam bursts into a loud, cackling laugh, and Clint and Tony join in. Yasha takes the chance to pull on his shirt, and Steve watches as the cherry tree blooming on his skin disappears under the fabric. Steve thinks about the soft, steady lilt of Yasha’s Finnish; his last remark. He turns away and blinks until the burning in his eyes has passed.

\----

"Come on, Steve," Bucky says, leading the way up the mountain, through the Fushimi Inari shrine’s endless rows of _torii_ gates. "Just a little more."

"I thought you wanted to see the cherry blossoms, not hike up steep hills," Steve complains. But he follows Bucky anyway, will anywhere.

"I've seen enough blossoms in the past three days to last a fucking lifetime," Bucky quips back. "Now I want to climb a mountain."

It's a reconstructed memory, Steve knows it, and somewhere outside this dream it’s the year 2015. But in this nook of his mind, it's 2010, and he and Bucky just finished a job in Kamakura that will pay for at least six months of vacation anywhere in the world. Bucky wanted to spend a week or two in Kyoto, and not only because of the cherry blossoms. Kyoto was where they’d done their very first two-man extraction, and Bucky was secretly a sap.

They climb on, and Bucky gets further and further ahead of Steve, until Steve can't see him anymore.

At the next landing, Sam’s waiting. He looks grim and determined as he watches Bucky's silhouette disappear into the forest of orange gates.

"Steve," he says, "what the hell, man? I come back to fetch my phone and find you with a needle in your arm _all by yourself._ Are you nuts?”

He takes a look at Steve’s differently-styled, shorter hair. “Is this a _memory_? Man, you know better than this."

"You shouldn't be here," Steve frowns, glances towards the gap Bucky has disappeared into.

“Like hell,” Sam says, now pissed. “You come here to fucking-- _hang out_ with your dead boyfriend’s ghost. What if something had happened, and nobody else had been in the dream to pull you out?”

“Fuck you,” Steve replies, anger rising in his voice. “You don’t know anything about this.”

Sam shakes his head. “You feel responsible for his death, I get it. But seriously, this isn’t healthy, Steve. You can’t lock him up down here and expect him to wait for you nicely. You’ll never let yourself grieve properly if you keep this up.”

“Steve?” It’s Bucky’s voice, and both Steve and Sam turn to look at him. Bucky’s eyes are narrowed, calculating, and he’s got a switchblade in his hand.

“I know why you’re here,” he tells Sam. “You want to take him back up, like he hasn’t always belonged to me.”

“No offense, buddy,” Sam replies, “but you’re dead.”

“No offense, _pal_ ,” Bucky parrots, “but you don’t know jack shit about us. If he can’t let me go, he fucking better stay down here with me.”

“Let’s go, Sam,” Steve cuts in and starts tugging him away.

Bucky takes a menacing step towards them, then another, and flicks the knife open. There are promises in his eyes, but Steve doesn’t want to stay and find out what they are.

“You’re a fucking mess, Steve,” Bucky says as he inches closer. “You look at _him_ and see me, but you keep telling yourself that you’re getting better.”

Steve flinches. Sam looks between them with questioning eyes. “Who are you talking about?”

Bucky smirks and wiggles the fingers of his left hand as it turns into gleaming metal. Sam frowns, confused.

“Steve thinks he has a crush,” Bucky says, but his smile is nasty. “It would be cute if it wasn’t so pathetic.” He comes closer and curls the metal hand into a fist, ready to strike.

Sam closes his eyes like he wants to avoid watching himself get gutted.

But just as Bucky lifts the knife, the timer runs out, and they wake up in the warehouse.

“Your ghost boyfriend is right. You,” Sam says and points at Steve with an accusing finger, “are a fucking mess.”

“I know.” Steve droops, deflated and guilty.

In real life, Bucky and Steve had come back from Fushimi and found the closest Yoshinoya to get lunch at. But Bucky’s huge bowl of _gyudon_ had been interrupted by a shoot-out; the architect they’d hired for a job in Nagoya the previous year had sold them out. Trust an old job to come back to bite them in the ass at the worst possible moment.

They’d ended up running away on foot, Bucky yelling expletives in four languages, pissed about being forced to abandon his lunch. In the end, they’d taken the bus up north to Ginkakuji-michi and strolled down the Tetsugaku-no-michi to see more cherry blossoms.

It was blossom-watching season, but it had been raining earlier, so the pathway running alongside the small canal had been pleasantly quiet. By the fifth tree, Bucky had stopped grumbling about his lost lunch.

Steve swallows and tries to forget the vivid image of the rain-slicked pathway, the crow’s feet in the corners of Bucky’s eyes as he’d smiled, the smell of wet dust and fried red-bean-filled cakes. It used to be a happy memory, but Bucky’s death turned everything bittersweet; now it leaves the taste of ash in Steve’s mouth.

Sam looks at him and sighs, probably wondering how he landed in this mess. “You’re aware that by going back there you’re only making it worse, right? You’ll never get over his death if you keep this up. Shit, it sounds like your own fucking projection wants you to let him go. And what the hell was he saying about you and Yasha?”

Steve nods and fidgets with his IV, but doesn’t meet Sam’s eyes. He feels guilty, and Sam sighs again. “You don’t want to get over him.”

“No,” Steve admits. “I probably don’t. Bucky… We met when I was seven. Now that he’s dead, there’s nobody else who knew me before all this.” He gestures at himself and goes quiet for a moment. Then he says, "There's something I want to show you. Please."

Sam has always been really bad at saying no when someone asks him nicely. So he has no other choice but to plug in again with Steve, already uneasy about whatever is waiting deep inside Steve's fucked-up head.

\----

The first thing Sam sees is the sand. They’re in a mountain-rimmed valley in the middle of nowhere, and the sun is baking hot on the back of his head.

"Come on," Steve's voice says. But when Sam turns, the guy who greets him is a world away from the Steve Rogers he's working with.

This Steve is _tiny_ , with stick-like limbs and a narrow chest. He's wearing a too-large army-issued t-shirt and sweatpants, and his hair is a blond ball of fluff sticking out in every possible direction. He looks all of thirteen-years-old, even though he must be in his twenties.

"This is me when I enlisted, back in 2003," Steve says. "90 pounds soaking wet, asthma, bad ears, colorblind. You name it, I had it."

They start walking towards the base - suddenly only a hundred yards away - and Sam can see the airstrips and the white glare of the salt flat at the end of the runways. Something about it feels familiar and gives Sam a bad feeling. When he sees the F-117 stealth fighter abandoned on the runway, he gets it. Air base. Convenient, isolated location. Riley’s shitty conspiracy documentaries. Groom Lake.

"Is this _Area 51?"_ he asks, unable to keep the astonishment from his voice.

Steve nods. "Project Oneiros was only the second one of the programs I took part in. The first one was top secret, highly-classified, not-even-the-President-knows type of shit. It was called Project Rebirth."

They walk through the gate, past the drowsy guards, into the compound.

"Bucky had been in the Army since 2000. He did a short tour in Afghanistan after 9/11, then went into the Special Forces. He was a 10th Group Green Beret by the time I got in, deployed to Germany and Iraq.

“Bucky enlisted for the money and the promise of a college education. He always said that it was something to do, but he was very good at it. He claimed he’d attended Special Forces Assessment and Selection out of boredom, but ended up blowing through all the test’s high scores."

Steve laughs a little. His expression is fond. “I wasn’t surprised. Bucky was brilliant: intelligent, adaptive, sharp as hell. Back in Brooklyn he was always best pals with everybody. And he spoke five languages, all picked up from kids on the street and old ladies in bodegas.”

Steve swallows. "He wanted to be an actor. He was really talented, but as you can imagine, New York was bursting at the seams with people who wanted to be actors. We didn't have the money for drama school. So he went into the Army and became a sniper instead."

Sam thinks about it. He can already see the story Steve is laying out in front of him: a young Spec Ops soldier with an innovative, open mind who was selected for a secret program to test new methods of warfare and the best friend who was too stubborn to be left behind. It all ends in heartbreak. Sam thinks about how familiar it is, thinks about Riley, and suddenly he aches.

"I got enlisted because I thought I could... I don’t know, make a change,” Steve says. “I was twenty-two and idealistic as hell. The Iraq War was a mess, as you know, and I thought that maybe if I were there, I could help people and serve as a better example of what an American soldier should be.”

Steve huffs a dry laugh. “In the end, I never left the States. When I managed to get enlisted, everybody assumed I would be kicked out immediately or put on desk duty," he says as they go in through a door and start navigating the corridors. "But my basic training course was overseen by Doctor Abraham Erskine who submitted my name for Project Rebirth. I was accepted. That’s how I became--"

"Captain America," Sam finishes quietly. He’s starting to understand what Steve meant when he said that Bucky knew him ‘before all this’.

Steve nods. He’s suddenly big again, his t-shirt stretched obscenely across his shoulders. "They injected me with Erskine’s serum, which made me bigger and cured all my illnesses. When I was selected, I agreed to my face being used for recruitment ads if the serum worked. It did, and all of a sudden, I had this new body. I was paraded through political fundraisers, recruitment fairs, interviews, you name it.

“Then the AP report of Abu Ghraib came out, and everything went crazy. People zeroed in on me as the face of America in Iraq. It got so bad, that the Army assigned me here, to Project Oneiros. I was good enough to be the face of the War on Terror, but not good enough to be sent to the front. So, they tucked me away in a lab.

“Bucky was assigned to the Project too, so I really couldn’t complain. And after I learnt what our troops were doing in the Middle East… well, I was glad I never made it there. Abu Ghraib was just the tip of the iceberg. If I could take back giving my face to that fucking war, I would.”

There had been some talk about Captain America when Sam was in the Air Force twelve years ago. Captain America had been the poster boy for the War on Terror: a handsome, All-American beefcake and the face of all the brave men fighting for their country. There had been rumors that he was the product of a secret government genetic mutation experiment, and Fox News spent a significant amount of time trying to pacify everyone’s paranoia. Captain America was a stupid name, like something out of a 40’s wartime comic book. But people fell for it hook, line, and sinker because they were afraid and wanted to latch on something.

It was even funnier when someone found out about the actual 40's radio show in which a guy called Captain America - who had his own sidekick and theme song - punched Adolf Hitler in the face on an almost daily basis. Clint was clearly fond of it, since his music-timed kicks were always, _always_ set to the cheery tune of the Captain America theme song. Sam was doomed to wake up with “The Star-Spangled Man with a Plan” stuck in his head until November.

They never gave out his real name, but Sam heard it, much later, from a drunken chemist in a dingy bar somewhere in Chennai. _Steve Rogers_ , Jaan had slurred. _A fucking genius, man. Captain fuckin’ America, now stealin' secrets, like he’s tellin’ America to go fuck ‘emselves._

Steve opens a door, and there they are: Barnes and five other men, all sprawled in deck chairs, connected by IVs to a crude-looking Mark One PASIV.

"These are Project Oneiros’ Howling Commandos," Steve says quietly and points them out.

"James Barnes, Jacques Dernier, Timothy Dugan, James Morita, Gabriel Jones, and James Falsworth. They were hand-picked from the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs. Falsworth and Dernier were British SAS and French Special Forces, respectively, since this was a joint operation. Bucky was their squad leader until I came on in March 2004."

Sam looks at Barnes. He looks different from his ghost. He's a little stockier, heavier around his shoulders, hair shorn close to his skull. There’s still some baby fat around his jaw even though, if he’s a Beret, he must be at least twenty-two or twenty-three years old. His insignia indicates that he’s a Staff Sergeant - a damn young guy to have that rank. Sam has no illusions about how fucking good a soldier Barnes had to be, first to qualify for Special Forces, and then to get an unusually fast promotion and be hand-picked to lead a squad in a classified program.

He remembers the lean, stylish man from Steve's other dreams, the military bulk long gone and sharpened into practical grace, hair teased into a neat coif. Sam wishes he’d gotten the chance to meet Barnes before he died, because he sounds like he was a hell of a guy, just the sort that Sam would’ve loved to have as a friend.

Steve leans over Barnes’ projection and smoothes his hand over his buzzcut. It’s a raw and tender gesture, and Sam has to turn away and swallow around his dry throat, feeling like he’s witnessing something private.

“I was twenty-two when they made me into a national icon,” Steve says softly. “I’m a year older than Bucky. When I joined Project Oneiros, he was three days shy of twenty-two and had seen more shit in three years than most people do in eighty. They assigned him here straight from Iraq, after he’d been rescued - he was a POW for four weeks, in the autumn 2003. We were so goddamn young, when you think about it. The rest of the Commandos were older than us - Falsworth by five years, Dum Dum Dugan almost fifteen. But they followed us anyway without a single complaint about our age.”

When Sam was twenty-two, he was still fooling around in college, trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life. He didn’t join the Air Force until he was twenty-five and didn’t get roped into dreamsharing until he hit thirty-two. It hurts to think that he spent his youth stressing about essays and finding the cheapest canned tuna, while Steve spent it as a mannequin for a war he clearly didn’t believe in, and Barnes spent it as a Staff Sergeant with more red in his ledger than he could wipe off.

In the end, Sam thinks, Steve and Bucky’s story is just a long line of increasingly fucked-up tragedies.

“Were you really promoted to Captain from Private without any kind of service history?” Sam asks when he can trust his voice again. “‘Cause that’s pretty alarming.”

Steve sighs but doesn’t object. “They thought it would look bad if Captain America was really just Corporal Rogers. Luckily, I turned out to be good with dreams. It didn’t hurt that I was in peak physical condition and had a photographic memory and a head for tactical stuff.”

Steve’s smile is sad and cynical when he mutters in the most sarcastic tone Sam has ever heard, “Dreaming is pretty much the only thing I’ve ever been good at.”

\----

“What happened with Barnes?” Sam asks after the timer runs out and they wake up. Barnes’ name was never linked with Project Oneiros, only Steve's. Sam’s never even heard of the rest of their squad.

Steve shrugs, looks slightly wistful. “He was a natural, and he was the first one to start experimenting with changing his looks in the dream. He showed the results to me and made me try it when he was certain it could be done. But frankly? I was shit at it.”

Sam snorts involuntarily, and Steve gives him a small, rueful grin. “I could change my clothes and alter my face after a lot of practise, but I was still _me_. Bucky would slide into another body like it was a swimming pool, and turn into a completely different person.”

Sam tried forging once. Riley had grasped the basics and had managed to change his face to resemble his mother, but not his body. Riley had walked around in the dream, shooting the shit with Sam through his mom’s mouth while otherwise looking like an ex-soldier wearing a pair of too tight jeans. Sam had laughed until he was crying, and Riley had said, “Oh, all right, let’s see what you can do, Wilson.”

Sam was able to do exactly nothing. He was a Pararescueman and an architect, all right? He didn’t need to go prancing around wearing somebody else’s skin like a creepy serial killer.

“Bucky never told anyone but me about it,” Steve continues. “He didn’t trust the Army, not after Iraq, or-- or what they did to me, and he was right not to. The military started to train soldiers in dreamspace about five months after I joined Project Oneiros, and for a year we taught young people to fight by forcing them to die again and again in the dream. I wasn’t really that surprised when the whole program went to hell: a Marine lost his mind and killed five people, thinking he was still in a dream.

“After that, we got a little paranoid. So, Bucky and I went AWOL in November 2005. We took the Mark Three PASIV and the formula for Somnacin with us. Afterwards, we heard that they’d wiped all memory of the program from the Commandos’ minds. Project Oneiros was terminated, and Bucky and I were wanted for treason.”

Sam whistles a little, feeling slightly sick. He’s never heard the full story behind Project Oneiros, and therefore hasn’t really thought about the implications of training someone to die. “What a goddamn mess.”

“You’re telling me,” Steve snorts, self-deprecatingly. “I became a patriotic-icon-turned-fugitive, Bucky became a ghost story, and our friends were fucked over by their own country.” He shakes his head a little. “Sometimes I wish Bucky’d never gone to war, because maybe then I would’ve never felt the need to follow him. We’d still be piss-poor and scrabbling for jobs back in Brooklyn, but Bucky would still be alive.”

Sam doesn’t tell him that what-ifs don’t help a bit. Steve knows it, just like everybody else in the world does, and Sam has never been one to give unnecessary cold comfort. So he claps his hand down on Steve’s massive shoulders when they start to shake and squeezes, because sometimes that’s the only thing one can really do - grab something and hold on.

\----

A month after Bucky’s death, Steve had had a rare natural dream; his first in years. He’d stood in the ruins of the veterinary clinic, staring at the destruction, feeling like somebody was pouring icy water into his stomach, into his lungs. He’d imagined this scene so many times in the days after the explosion, replaying it over and over again, wondering how he could have prevented it from happening.

Something had shifted in the shadows at his four o’clock, and he’d known who it was.

“Hi, baby,” Bucky had said behind him, his voice oddly flat and colorless, distant as if they were underwater.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve said, on the verge of tears.

Bucky coughed: a terrible, wet sound. “Don’t look at me,” he warned in that detached, disembodied voice. “I ain’t as pretty as I used to be.”

“So you’re still ugly?” Steve replied automatically, and Bucky laughed a little, cracked and hoarse.

“Sit down, Steve,” Bucky told him, and when Steve did, Bucky’s voice was suddenly a lot closer. “It’s easier like this.”

And it was; it felt like they were sitting back to back in the twilight, like they had numerous times as kids on Steve’s bed, whenever they had something difficult to discuss.

They had been friends for such a long time; Bucky had loved him for such a long time, and Steve could almost feel it radiating out of Bucky.

“You’re dead, aren’t you?” Steve couldn’t help asking.

Bucky was quiet for a long time, a steady, comforting weight against Steve’s back. His inhales were shallow, and his exhales raspy and wet. “Yeah,” he murmured finally. “Can’t really help it.”

Logically, Steve knew that nobody could’ve survived that blast, unless they were enhanced or very, very lucky. Bucky was skilled, but he wasn’t immortal. Still, Bucky confirming it felt like a corkscrew being twisted into his stomach.

They were quiet again, listening to the breath rattling in Bucky’s chest, like they had listened to Steve’s weak lungs fighting for air during bad winters.

“Listen, Steve,” Bucky said then, “don’t come looking for me. It’s too late.” Something gurgled when he coughed.

“I can’t,” Steve choked back. “I can’t _not_ come. You said yes. _You said yes_ , Bucky.”

“I did,” Bucky said softly. “And I would’ve said yes a thousand times, no matter what. But loving someone who’s dead will lead you nowhere. You gotta keep on living.”

“I gotta find you,” Steve whispered, swallowing back tears. He could feel Bucky shaking his head.

“No. You know where to find me, and it ain’t a good place for you. Stand down, Steve. Let it lie.”

Steve closed his eyes. He could feel Bucky shifting, and then cold lips being pressed to his forehead.

“Live, motherfucker,” Bucky murmured into Steve’s hair. “Please, be happy without me. You deserve to. I love you.”

 _You gotta keep on living_ , Steve thought after he woke up, gasping, in his own bed, too wide and empty without Bucky’s warmth. It didn’t matter that his own subconscious was trying to give him a break in the form of Bucky - Steve would never just let it lie. He didn’t deserve to, and Bucky didn’t deserve to be forgotten so easily.

 _I’ll keep on living until I’ve finished what we started in Moscow, Buck_ , he thought as he scooped water into his mouth from the kitchen tap and realized he was crying, weeping silently over the sink. _But just until then. Then, I’m gonna find you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yasha's code translations come from [this awesome post on tumblr](http://idioticonion.tumblr.com/post/143678249955/winter-soldier-reprogramming-definitive-version).
> 
> The poem Yasha recites is an excerpt from the last verse of Viipurin vartio (The Guard of Vyborg) by Eino Leino. It's from 1914 when Finland was still part of Russia as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. The full verse goes:
> 
> Voi virat vaipua, maat voi hukkua,  
> vaan ei kansojen omatunto nukkua,  
> siellä on vapauden haaveilo haikein,  
> missä sen puolesta taisto on vaikein.  
> Viipuri! Seisot kuin kallio meressä,  
> seisonut ennen jo tulessa ja veressä,  
> kertoa voivat sun muurisi harmaat  
> isänmaan kohtalot kolkot ja armaat;  
> Viipuri! Et sinä sortua saa.  
> Jos sinä seisot, seisovi maa.
> 
> Freely translated (excerpt bolded): _Offices can fall, lands can drown / but not the conscience of the people sleep / the dream of freedom is the most ardent / where the fight for it is the harshest / **Vyborg! You stand like a cliff in the sea / have stood before through fire and blood / your grey walls could recount / the fates of the fatherland, dreary and dear / Vyborg! You cannot fall / if you stand, so stands the nation.**_
> 
> Finland lost Vyborg to Russia for good in Continuation War in 1944.
> 
> Yoshinoya is a fast food chain originating from Japan; gyudon is rice topped with beef and onions. Fushimi Inari shrine and Tetsugaku-no-michi (Philosopher's path) are both very, very nice places to drop a visit to, if you happen to be in Kyoto.
> 
> You're all welcome to come yell at me on [tumblr](http://rohkeutta.tumblr.com).


	2. PART TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The incredible art in this chapter is by [misspaperjoker](http://misspaperjoker.tumblr.com), who also has an Etsy shop [here](https://www.etsy.com/shop/MissPaperJoker).

Five days before their scheduled extraction Natasha comes in with the grimmest expression Steve has ever seen on her face. “We have a problem,” she says, and almost two months of work goes to waste.

They’ve all been laughably naïve - what they thought was an extensive human trafficking ring turns out to be a full-scale secret organization that’s hell bent on world domination.

Natasha has friends in SHIELD, and she’s found out through them that Pierce’s secret organization - HYDRA - has infiltrated SHIELD all the way to the top. That’s where all of Pierce’s mysterious money transfers have been leading to.

The information Natasha has - about HYDRA’s long game, the helicarriers, and their millions of targets - is so terrifying that all of them sit in silence for a long, long time.

Yasha has turned away, a full-body twist that keeps his face hidden from everybody else. Steve has a bad feeling that this is the reason why Yasha was forced to militarize Pierce.

“Wait a minute,” Sam says suddenly, breaking the silence. His expression looks torn between appalled and furious. “Yasha, you’ve been inside Pierce’s mind. You didn’t think this information was worth sharing? Or were you waiting for the right moment to drop a ‘Hail HYDRA’ and sell us out?”

Steve can almost taste the venom in Sam’s voice. He’d be lying if he said that the thought didn’t cross his mind too. It’s a topic they’ve been skirting around intentionally, not willing to press if Yasha didn’t want to talk about it.

Yasha flinches and whips around, blood draining from his face. His expression is terribly, openly hurt for a second. Then, it closes off completely, becomes cool and unreadable. Steve feels like he’s watching doors slam shut, and the lack of emotion on Yasha’s face makes him uneasy. The last time Yasha shut down like this was when Pierce’s militarization came up, almost two months ago.

Yasha stands, draws himself up to his full height, and lifts his chin in silent challenge. He’s wearing slim-fitting sweatpants and a ratty band t-shirt, and his hair is messy and a little tangled. Still, he looks more dangerous than anyone Steve has met in a long time.

When he says flatly, “I was HYDRA’s prisoner for two years,” Steve wishes that Sam had just kept his goddamn mouth shut.

Sam looks stricken and opens his mouth as if to apologize, but Yasha lifts his metal hand to stop him.

“I am not looking for an apology,” he says in a tone that sounds detached and clinical. “I just want you to understand. Under their control, I rarely saw anybody. They tortured me and forced me to work for them, and I wasn’t aware of anything beyond my missions. They could have been _Bratva_ or CIA for all I knew.” He shrugs, and the look in his eyes is far away. “I am not lying - this job is personal for me too. I did a lot of bad things for them. But I’m not HYDRA.”

He walks out and closes the door gently behind him. Steve wishes he’d slammed it - this dissociated way Yasha handles his past feels worse than any honest anger could.

There’s a thick, awkward silence in the room after he leaves, and Steve tries to count his breaths to block out the truth he’s just learnt. He suspected that Yasha took the job for reasons other than just money, but he didn’t think it was this personal for him too.

When he’s calmed down, Steve clears his throat and waits for everyone to look at him. “Our mission objective has changed,” he says. “We’re going to take down both HYDRA and SHIELD. It all has to go. If Natasha’s information is correct, HYDRA has rooted itself too deeply in SHIELD to be pulled out cleanly. Our task is to get every ounce of intel out of Pierce so that Natasha’s friends can stop the helicarriers.” He looks around. “Most of us used to be soldiers first, thieves second. Let’s show them that we can still be both.”

There are reluctant and determined nods all around him.

“So, how the hell are we going to pull this off?” Clint asks.

“The World Security Council,” Natasha says, tapping her fingers against her knee, the first nervous gesture Steve has seen from her. “There are rumours that they’ve been called in to witness the launching of Project Insight. I assume Pierce will tell them about HYDRA’s infiltration of SHIELD, just to gloat. They could provide a distraction while we crack the safe. But there’s no way we can replicate the full council, not even with projections. There are four of them.”

“Actually,” Yasha cuts in as he steps back into the room. His eyes look a little brighter and he’s still pale, but he’s clearly come back from his closed-off state. “I have one more trick up my sleeve. Come on, I’ll show you.”

“Listen, Yasha,” Sam starts and shakes his head when Yasha looks like he’s about to argue. “No, man, let me say it. I was out of line, and I’m sorry. I know you’re not one of them.” He sticks out his hand, and Yasha takes it, his expression softening.

“ _Da_ ,” Yasha says and shakes Sam’s hand. “We are good, Sam. Now come on, I want you to find me.”

Yasha puts five minutes on the PASIV timer and assigns them the usual exercise of finding him in a crowd of projections. Bruce stays up top to monitor them while Steve, Sam, Natasha, and Clint go down into the dream with Yasha.

They open their eyes to a ballroom that’s half-filled with people. They mingle, chat with projections, and try to find Yasha, looking for a tell that would give him away. They’ve done this exercise as a team several times, so they keep all senses open - Yasha is cunning but likes to give hints if they seem to be stuck.

Steve keeps an eye out for Bucky, but if he’s there, he’s wearing someone else’s face and doesn’t start trouble.

When the team gathers back together, they have it narrowed down to four suspects: the waiter with a tie like the one Tony was wearing the last time he visited, the little girl in a _Frozen_ dress, the middle-aged lady who flirted aggressively with Sam, and the very drunk young man wearing dog tags around his neck. All of them had given more precise answers than a projection normally would, and they all gave at least one person on the team a hint of some sort: a specific hand gesture or a meaningful twitch of an eyebrow. They argue over about which one Yasha was for the remaining fifteen minutes, but they can’t come up with a definite answer.

When they wake up, Yasha is looking at them with a hint of a smile curling the corner of his mouth. “So,” he says, smile growing a little, “Which one was I?”

Steve stares at Yasha, at the mischievous glint in his eye, and finally gets it. “All of them,” he says, voice cracking a little with astonishment. “You were all of them.”

Yasha grins at him, ignoring Sam’s and Clint’s flabbergasted faces, and shrugs, his eyes sparkling and even a little happy.

Steve wants to kiss him, and the thought almost knocks him off his feet, because the desire is sudden and more powerful than the fleeting thoughts he’s had about Yasha before. Then he thinks about Bucky’s ghost sniping, “Steve thinks he has a crush,” and the want turns into shame.

He hasn’t been interested in anyone else since Bucky died, and realizing that he might be attracted to Yasha is terrifying. Yasha pulls on an invisible string in Steve’s chest, but there’s something skeevy about being attracted to a man who resembles his lost lover. That definitely isn’t a healthy way to move on.

“Split forging,” Yasha says, seemingly unconcerned that the rest of them are finally realizing that he’s a goddamn genius. Even Natasha looks openly impressed. “I have been working on it for a while and tested it on an easier job a couple of months ago. I did it in secret, and my team didn’t have a clue. I am confident it will work.”

Sam whistles admiringly. “That’s really impressive, man. First the codes in Pierce’s head and now this - you sure you’re not a wizard?”

Yasha laughs a little and shakes his head. “I’m going to need a lot of material on the council members. As much as we can dig up. If I need to whip up four forges in four days, everything needs to be in my hands as soon as possible.”

Natasha nods, turns to her desk. “I’m on it. Clint and Bruce, with me.”

“I saw Councilwoman Hawley up close a year or two ago,” Yasha tells her. “I’ll start with her.”

“I’ll need to adjust my maze,” Sam realizes. “I’ll need footage from the World Security Council meeting room, in the Triskelion.”

“I’ll get you that,” Natasha promises, and they all jump into action.

Steve looks at them, the way they immediately find a way to work around this huge, _huge_ problem, and feels fierce gratitude. These people answered his call, followed him into this very personal mission that, now, could decide the fate of the world, and none of them have said a word about dropping out.

\----

The next days pass in a blur. Yasha spends all of his time at the warehouse, plugged in whenever he isn’t reviewing Natasha’s information or watching footage of the council members.

Steve catches him there two days later, a little before seven in the morning. When Steve opens the door, Yasha is stretching in front of the coffee maker, yawning a little. He’s wearing thick woollen socks, a pair of sweatpants, and a soft-looking, rumpled sweatshirt with a hole in the armpit. He must have slept at the workshop, too worked up to go home - there’s an afghan on one of the deck chairs.

Yasha turns and smiles at Steve, makes a hand gesture that probably means _good morning,_ and reaches for a mug. He’s still sleepy, soft and vulnerable, and his eyes look very green in the pale light of the dawn. It’s a highly intimate look, sleep-warm and drowsy, and Steve wants so much to pull him in that it feels like he’s been punched in the chest.

He stares for so long that Yasha turns to look at him, the coffee pot in his hand, probably unnerved by Steve’s silence. When he sees Steve staring at him, Yasha blinks and asks, “Steve? What are you looking at?”

“I like you,” Steve blurts out before he can stop himself.

Yasha freezes. “What?”

Steve breathes slowly through his nose a couple of times. The cat’s out of the bag, so it’s probably better to just get this over with, even if it all goes to hell. He doesn’t have to see Yasha again if they make it out of Pierce’s mind alive.

He steels himself and repeats, “I like you.”

Yasha sets the coffee pot back on the burner, turns, and pins Steve with a look. He asks mildly, “But?”

Steve huffs a self-deprecating laugh. “But you look a lot like the man I was supposed to marry. I don’t trust myself with this. I can’t tell if I like you because of you or because you’re so much like Bucky.”

Yasha considers that, his mouth pursed, tapping his fingers against the table. Then he says, “I like you, too. But me reminding you so much of your ex is definitely a problem.”

Something warm and hopeful blooms in Steve’s chest at the words. He clears his throat. “I know I have no right to ask this,” he says, and then his voice goes almost _pleading_ , _shit_. “But can you give me a little time? This-- this job is my way to avenge Bucky’s death. Hopefully, when it’s over, I’ll finally get my shit together.”

Yasha tilts his head and thinks for a while.

Steve’s mentally beating himself up. How terrible is it to first tell a man that you’re not sure if you like him for himself, and then have the gall to ask him to _wait_ for you? Really fucking appalling, that’s what it is.

But then Yasha’s mouth quirks up in a small smile, and Steve helplessly takes a step forward towards him.

“I’ll give you a chance,” Yasha says and slowly walks closer. “After this job is over, you have two months to come find me in Vyborg. If you’re not there by New Year’s, I am moving on.”

“Thank you,” Steve breathes, a sudden, violent relief bubbling up inside him.

Yasha smiles a little, reaches out and squeezes Steve’s arm with his prosthetic hand. “You are a good man, Steve. I hope you get your head straight.”

The door opens, and Clint comes in carrying a plastic bag from a bodega. “Hey Yasha, I brought you breakf--” He stops when he sees Steve. His sharp eyes swiftly take in Yasha’s hand on Steve’s arm and how close they’re standing, and he lifts one eyebrow. “Morning, Steve.”

Steve clears his throat a little and steps away from Yasha. He has no idea what expression is on his face. “Morning, Clint.”

Clint looks at him funnily but doesn’t say anything. The corner of Yasha’s mouth is tugging up, like he’s trying to smother a smile.

\----

Yasha sleeps the next night in the warehouse, too. The shadows under his eyes are growing, but he’s making progress.

He’s making so much progress that when Steve goes down into a dream with him the next day, they’re immediately surrounded by the World Security Council, talking quietly amongst themselves. Only Councilman Rockwell is still slightly soft around his edges.

Yasha is inspecting his forges with a frown, pacing around them in a green t-shirt and black skinny jeans. Steve is almost breathless looking at Yasha and the people he’s created. Yasha’s beautiful and unmistakably brilliant, and suddenly Steve _wants_ , he wants so much that it aches. He wants Bucky back, but at the same time he doesn’t. He wishes that the ghost of Bucky would finally stop haunting him, so he can move on. Most of all he wants to not feel guilty when he lets his gaze glide down Yasha’s body and feels it somewhere inside him, in a place in his chest he thought was long dead.

He’s still staring at the side of Yasha’s head when Yasha turns and says, “Steve, are you okay?”

Steve snaps out of it, clears his throat. “Yeah,” he says. “It looks amazing. You’re amazing.”

Yasha flashes him a small smile. “I try.”

\----

Later that evening, Steve’s typing an email to his contact in D.C. about the cars they’ll need for the job. It’s quiet in the warehouse; it’s getting late, and everyone except for Steve and Yasha has left for the day.

They’re set to do the final test run tomorrow morning before they drive down to D.C. in the afternoon. They’ll grab Pierce in the early hours of Friday morning, before he can leave for the Triskelion, and - if everything goes according to plan - they’ll be done and making their way back to New York by 8 a.m. They’ll need a discreet van for the grab and different cars for the drive back to New York to keep their tracks covered as well as possible.

Yasha has been in and out of the dream for the better part of the day, perfecting Rockwell and testing with Clint how his forges work when he’s not in the same room as them.

“Hey,” his soft voice carries from the corner where he’s scribbling down something.

Steve looks up. “Yeah?”

“May I ask you something?”

Steve nods, and Yasha puts his pencil down, gets up, and comes to him. In the warm glow of Steve’s desk lamp, he doesn’t resemble Bucky at all - the lack of expression on his face is something he can’t ever remember seeing on Bucky’s.

They’re quiet for a moment, and just when Steve is about to gently prompt him, Yasha says, his voice like gravel in his throat, “What do you know about Limbo?”

Steve knows plenty about Limbo.

He remembers plunging in too deep and washing up on the shore to find Bucky sitting on the low wall surrounding the nearby graveyard. It had been the only thing waiting for Steve in the empty landscape: Hietaniemi beach and the graveyard from Helsinki, where they had once strolled. It was fitting, that Bucky’s ghost had been there, in the place where they were last happy together.

Steve remembers how Bucky had smirked up at him from where he was lying on the beach towel, and the slow, languid way he had stretched, his t-shirt riding up to expose his hipbones. He remembers the feeling of his feet buried in the sand, the sun hot on his skin, the salty and humid smell of the air, the structures morphing as he sketched them.

He spent two years building the towers of Angkor Wat, sculpting the stony smiles of Bayon, a year raising the rows of _torii_ on the pathway to Cafe Regatta. He built the world around them from bits and pieces of the places they had visited and loved together, and Bucky watched, lazy and content, corrected him on details he got wrong.

Steve remembers long days, long months, long years full of sea-coloured eyes and his blood singing _Bucky Bucky Bucky,_ until his hair turned grey, and the world around them started to decay and crumble.

In Limbo, Bucky aged in the same way a long-lost child might be aged by a forensic artist: the basic structure was the same, but everything about him and his aging face looked unnatural. Unlike Steve, who grew old with time, Bucky looked like he was always permanently stuck in twenty-nine, and that’s how Steve knew it was time to wake up.

While Steve had spent decades in Limbo with Bucky’s ghost, in the real world, nothing had changed - Bucky was still dead and people were still calling the Moscow job a ‘shitstorm’ or a ‘fuck-up’ behind Steve’s back.

It was a relief when, the next time Steve went down into a dream, he found that Bucky’s ghost had followed him up from Limbo.

Steve clears his throat and looks back at Yasha. “I know that it’s not just a theory.”

Yasha makes a small noise. “Is it true what they say - that you’ll lose yourself?”

Steve isn’t sure. He lost himself over a year before he fell down through a crack in his mind and landed in the sea. It’s hard to say whether he lost more down there or not.

“I guess,” he says slowly. “You can live a full life in Limbo, and waking up and finding that you still have another left unfinished might turn you inside out.”

They’re both silent for a while. Then Yasha says, “You were there.”

Steve nods, his throat full of barbed wire.

“I’m sorry I asked,” Yasha murmurs, gets up, and goes to grab his stuff. The blankness is still there, like someone took out what was inside of him and left only hollow bones and empty eyes. “Goodnight,” he says and disappears through the doorway before Steve can get another word out.

Steve sighs, rubs his temples to try and soothe the dull headache, and stands up. As always, Yasha left the PASIV neatly packed on the side table, where it’s easy for Steve to grab when he leaves.

On his way home, Steve passes the exposed red brick buildings of Red Hook and Carroll Gardens, the color familiar and haunting. While he’s waiting for the G train at Carroll St. station, he thinks back to his conversation with Yasha. The station is hushed and chilly, but when he closes his eyes, he ends up in another country.

Helsinki. Cafe Regatta. Sunday, July 24th, 2011.

It was high summer, and Bucky was laughing, tanned and gorgeous. They were sitting in front of a small café, almost on the waterfront. The July sky was arching above them, blue and bright even though it was late in the day. The sea reflected the sky, and somebody was shouting in the nearby rowing stadium. They’d flown in that morning, Bucky from Schiphol and Steve from Charles de Gaulle, and they were due to board the sleeper train to Moscow the next evening for a job.

Bucky’s long fingers were tearing into a cinnamon roll, still warm and fresh from the oven. Steve can't remember anymore what had made him laugh, but he remembers that his own fingers had itched for a pen and a sketchbook, to capture Bucky’s loveliness in the lingering warmth of the summer evening.

Bucky loved Finland and its cipher of a language, probably because it couldn't be further from Iraq or Nevada. He liked the short summer nights, the design shops, and the light roast coffee that was available everywhere. Steve liked the noisy green trams, the Nordic Art Nouveau buildings downtown, the moderate temperatures, and that the sea was never more than ten blocks away.

Helsinki was the edge of the world for them - something sheltered and secure, where people minded their own business, tucked away in one of the more peaceful corners in the world.

"This's really good, you should try it," Bucky said, his mouth full, and pushed his cinnamon roll towards Steve.

“We’ve been to this café over forty times in four years, I know what their _pulla_ tastes like,” Steve complained, making a mock-disgusted face at him. "And didn't your ma teach you not to talk with your mouth full? Someday you'll choke on all those pastries."

"Älä länkytä, vitun urpo," Bucky replied fondly, his mouth tilting around the weird vowels adorably.

By that time, Steve had already lost count of how many languages Bucky had mastered. _Jerk_ , he tried to say, to cover the fact that he had no idea what Bucky just said, but what came out instead was, “Marry me.”

Bucky stopped mid-chew and looked at him questioningly.

Steve cleared his throat and said it again, with confidence, because fuck, he wasn’t taking it back now. He even had a ring, back in their brownstone in Brooklyn, bought on impulse almost six months ago. “Marry me, Buck,” he repeated, careful to be quiet enough that the other customers didn’t hear.

Bucky was silent for a moment. He chewed thoughtfully while Steve waited, heart suddenly hammering in his throat.

Bucky swallowed and quirked a small, sweet smile. “Yeah,” he replied. “I think I can do that.”

Steve let out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding, reached over the table to kiss Bucky’s sugar-and-cardamom mouth, and said, “Fuck, I’m glad you didn’t say that with your mouth full.”

Bucky laughed again, safe and alive and invincible and _his_. He waggled his eyebrows, and smirked. “But you _like_ me with my mouth full.”

It was terrible and _so Bucky_ , and Steve couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Behind Bucky’s head, the low sunlight highlighted the bold red color of the café, which was just a shack perched on the rocky seashore. It made the auburn hues in Bucky’s hair glow like burnt gold, and he was so beautiful that Steve’s throat felt like it was closing up.

He took Bucky’s left hand, trying to blink the threatening tears away. Bucky smiled at him and squeezed his hand hard, looking a little wobbly around his mouth.

Steve would remember that exact shade of red for the rest of his life, because Cafe Regatta was the last place where he saw Bucky happy.

They’d boarded the train the next day, and in Moscow things went pear-shaped really fast and-- well, the rest was history.

Steve is jolted out of his thoughts when the train arrives, and he spends the entire journey to the Fulton St. station fighting back tears.

His brownstone feels cold and empty, frozen in time, and back in the spare room, Bucky’s belongings and the forgotten engagement ring are collecting dust.

\----

The next morning, the whole team gathers in the warehouse with their bags. The changes to Sam’s maze are finalized and Yasha’s forges are as ready as they’ll ever be. Bruce stays topside while the rest of them go down into the dream for the final rehearsal run.

When Steve blinks his eyes open in the dream, the sky above them is vast and endlessly blue. Next to him, Natasha is wearing a red jacket, and he blinks again, momentarily disoriented. The combination of the two colours is jarring and familiar: Cafe Regatta. Summer in the north.

"Steve?" Sam’s voice asks.

Steve snaps out of his thoughts and sees the concern on the faces around him. "I'm fine," he rasps out. "Let's go."

It’s their final test run before the actual extraction, and he shouldn’t let himself get distracted. He’s been doing better, lately - Bucky’s ghost hasn’t been showing up as much as before, and Steve likes to think that he’s finally starting to get over his death.

But it’s painfully obvious that Steve isn’t fine when - not fifteen minutes later, on the second level - Bucky shows up. He’s wearing a glinty-eyed smile and STRIKE’s tac gear, and there’s an engagement ring on his left hand: a band of white gold Steve never got the chance to give him.

Steve panics, and the dream around them starts to warp and morph into the ruined veterinary clinic.

Sam looks confused and then horrified when he turns around and spots Bucky. He tries to twist the architecture back to what it’s supposed to be, but it’s not working; the walls turn into steel and glass only for a second before shifting back into soot-covered concrete.

There’s an explosion somewhere in the building, and the foundations shake. Shouting voices and muffled footsteps thunder closer in the hallway behind them.

Bucky’s watching them with a bored expression, absently tapping the Beretta strapped to his thigh with his right hand and flipping a hunting knife with his left. It’s like he’s trying to decide whether to attack Sam and Steve or just leave them to the projections he’s calling in. The ring on Bucky’s finger glimmers in the fading light, and Steve feels sick.

“Steve,” Sam says urgently, grabbing his shoulders, “ _Steve, stop it._ ”

Suddenly, the door next to them crashes open. A man wearing an all-black leather and Kevlar uniform, a pair of goggles, and a goddamn _muzzle_ strides in. His chestnut hair is pulled back and tied into a knot at the base of his skull in an oddly familiar style. He raises his gun calmly, shoots Bucky’s ghost in the head, turns, and disappears into the hallway.

Sam and Steve are still staring after him, Bucky’s body fading out of view next to them, when Brock Rumlow scrambles in through the door.

“What’s going on?” Yasha’s voice asks, but he doesn’t drop his forge of Rumlow. “Are you guys alright?”

As soon as Steve breathes in through his nose and wills his panic to settle, the building around them melts back into Sam’s design of the Triskelion. “Yeah,” he manages. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“Who the fuck was that guy?” Sam asks, and Yasha frowns.

“Who?”

“The guy in the mask. You didn’t see him? He just went towards the control room.”

Yasha’s expression turns uncomfortable, which looks a little funny on Rumlow’s face. “Uh,” he mumbles. “That might have been me.”

They stare at him. “What?” Sam says.

Yasha sighs and slides back into his own body. His hair is pulled back, and Steve realizes why the man’s hairdo had looked so familiar. “I have a projection that shows up whenever the dream destabilizes. If I run into trouble, he takes care of it.”

“Wow,” Sam blinks. “That’s kinda… sweet, in a fucked up way. But why does he look like the Terminator?”

Yasha’s face goes flat and expressionless, and he turns back into Rumlow. “Because that is how they dressed me,” he replies curtly. “He is me when I was under their control. Come on, we have to move.” He disappears through the door and leaves Sam and Steve in stunned silence.

“Okay,” Sam finally says, slowly. “Remind me never to get on Yasha’s bad side.”

After that incident, their dress rehearsal goes smoothly. Sam’s maze is well-done and working as it’s supposed to, from shortcuts to paradoxes, and the council is almost eerily believable. It will, of course, be very different when they’re dealing with Pierce’s subconscious, but the groundwork is impeccable, and they leave the dream with a palpable air of relief.

“Natasha,” Steve says when they’re all awake topside and helping Bruce dismantle the workshop. She turns to look at him and narrows her eyes at his tone. “We need to change the dreamer for the second level. I-- I caused a huge bleed in the architecture when Bucky appeared. We can’t afford that.”

Natasha’s expression doesn’t change. “And you suggest...?”

“You,” Steve replies. “You know Sam’s design as well as I do, and being the dreamer will help you in case something happens and I fall into Limbo. Sam is the other option, but I’d prefer you.”

She purses her mouth, looking mildly displeased. She doesn’t like sudden changes, especially this late in the game, but she nods, albeit reluctantly. “Alright. It makes sense.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, relieved. “I’ll tell the others.”

“Steve,” Natasha says and reaches out to touch his arm, stopping him from turning away. Her eyes are hard. “I just want you to know that I’m giving Clint, Sam, and Yasha an order to shoot your ghost if he turns up again. You said it yourself: we can’t afford it.” She shakes her head. “Right now there’s much more on the line than just your revenge. If the job goes to hell because of your ghost, millions of people will die, and I won’t allow that.”

Steve swallows and opens his mouth to say something, anything, even though he doesn’t know what. But then, Yasha walks across the room behind Natasha’s back, carrying a heavy bag in his left hand. Steve suddenly remembers the soft-eyed promise of waiting that he made two days ago, that there’s something else in the world worth fighting for besides justice or painful memories.

“You’re right,” he says, and Natasha blinks, surprised. She glances behind her and arches one bemused eyebrow when she sees who Steve was looking at.

Steve clears his throat and looks away. “Well,” he coughs. “Glad that’s settled. I’ll let the team know.” Then he escapes to help Sam fold up the deck chairs and tell the team about the change. Natasha’s gaze is heavy and meaningful on his back.

“Right,” Steve says when they’ve packed up their equipment and cleaned up the shop. “Good job, everyone. We’ll meet at the D.C. base by 5 p.m. Sam and Bruce will take the sedan. Clint, Natasha, and Yasha will drive with me in the station wagon.”

He throws the keys to Sam, who catches them easily. “In D.C., Thor will pick up the cars and give us new ones for the trip back. Yasha and I will drive back to New York together in the other sedan while you four drive the SUV. We rendezvous in Bed-Stuy tomorrow by 4 p.m., so take some time for yourself. Go home and take a nap or something. All clear?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, and he and Bruce start to leave. “Remember that we still need to finalize a plan for the snatch.”

“Don’t worry, Steve,” Natasha assures him. She tilts her head towards Yasha. “We’ll take care of that.”

\----

“Absolutely not,” Steve says when he hears the plan.

Natasha and Yasha have been murmuring together in the backseat in Russian for most of the drive from New York to D.C., putting together a plan for snatching Pierce. It involves putting Yasha in shackles and practically offering him to Pierce on a platter.

Steve still doesn’t know much about Yasha’s history with HYDRA, but he hasn’t forgotten Yasha’s revelation that he was their prisoner. So, giving him back into their hands? No way in hell.

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Steve,” she repeats calmly, “it’ll work. Trust us. Yasha was an important asset to Pierce. Pierce would be delighted to get him back but wary enough to not alert everybody.”

“My existence was top secret,” Yasha says softly. “He will want to keep it that way.”

“Fine,” Steve sighs and clicks on the signal for their exit. “But I want it on record that I don’t like it.”

Clint taps the side of his head and slouches a little further down into the front seat. “Noted. But Steve, if Yasha is fine with it, we should be too. It’s his call, and it’s not like we have a better plan.”

Steve lets it slide.

They aren’t aiming for subtlety on this job - there’s no need to time the extraction for a surgery or a long flight, since they aren’t concerned about Pierce remembering the dream. Steve’s plan for revenge is to leave Pierce down in the dream, too sedated and lost to wake up again: it’s an ugly way to die, but so is getting blown up.

 

Their base is on the outskirts of D.C. It’s an old mechanic’s shop, and the windows are so dirty that they’re opaque. There’s a small parking lot behind the building, a cramped bathroom with a shower stall in the office, and enough room to spread the chairs out and get Tony’s tech set up in one corner.

Tony arrives a little after seven, smacks a loud, obnoxious kiss on Steve’s cheek and tries to do the same to Natasha, but her expression makes him turn to Clint instead. He calls Yasha “Robocop” and is jittery from too much caffeine, but they humour him. They always do.

While Tony and Bruce set up his computers and talk science in the corner, the rest of the team take the opportunity to sleep for a while. The deck chairs are uncomfortable, but Steve manages to catch a solid five hours of dreamless sleep. When he wakes up, it’s a little past 1 a.m., and it’s time to test out the plan.

Miraculously, it works. Tony has hacked into HYDRA’s communications system and manages to get Natasha direct access to Pierce. Natasha uses one of Tony’s hologenic veils to pose as a HYDRA operative and inform Pierce in the middle of the night about the recapture of The Soldier.

She shoves Yasha in front of the camera for a fleeting glimpse and barks something in Russian when he stumbles, before pushing him away again. The visual confirmation is enough; Pierce swallows the bait and orders her to bring The Soldier to his house as soon as possible.

The guards’ shift change happens at 8 a.m. at Pierce’s house. Since they’re grabbing Pierce around 4 a.m., they’ll have about four hours before the new guards report in and find that he’s missing. Steve’s old contact, Thor, has brought a black, nondescript van to the parking lot for the pickup.

Natasha, Clint, and Yasha leave the warehouse at 3:30 a.m., while it’s still dark outside. Natasha is driving the van, and Clint is watching over Yasha, who’s shackled in fake restraints in the back.

They’ve dressed Yasha in several bulky, mismatched layers that make him look like he’s been on the run. His stubble has grown in the past couple of days into an unkempt half-beard, and he’s wearing a dirty baseball cap. Along with the long, greasy hair, a serious lack of sleep, and some intentional roughhousing with Clint, the outfit and the glove covering his prosthetic make him look like a homeless vet.

But it’s Yasha’s expression that makes Steve stop. Yasha’s eyes are dead and empty, and his movements are slow and docile. He’s acting like he’s been drugged or doesn’t really know who he is.

Steve keeps reminding himself that Yasha is a forger, and that part of his job is to be a fantastic actor. Still, Steve has to take a couple of deep breaths and calm himself down to keep from stopping the plan and forcing them to figure out another way to get Pierce. He hops up into the van and crouches in front of Yasha, touches his forearm.

“Hey,” Steve says, and Yasha looks up, the fog in his eyes dissolving instantly back into their usual sharpness. It’s a relief to see. “Are you still sure about this?”

Yasha nods, pats the closest part of Steve’s arm clumsily. “Yes. I will be fine, Steve.”

“Okay.” Steve swallows around the sudden lump in his throat. “Just… be careful. Good luck.”

Yasha’s eyes go soft for a second, and without his glasses the expression looks so much like Bucky that Steve almost leans forward and presses their foreheads together. But he doesn’t; he doesn’t. Yasha is brave, so ridiculously brave, but that doesn’t make him Bucky, and Steve has no right. So he just grabs Yasha’s cold metal fingers and squeezes them briefly before standing up.

“Time to go,” Clint says from the doorway of the van. Steve nods, squares his shoulders and jumps out as Clint climbs in.

Yasha raises his fingers in a small salute, and Clint closes the doors. Steve watches them drive away.

“You’re getting soft, Steve,” Tony says, but his face is surprisingly serious when Steve turns to look at him. He inclines his head towards the road. “He looks a lot like Barnes.”

Steve swallows. “I know,” he replies. “I’m trying to see past that.”

Tony claps his hand down on Steve’s shoulder, and squeezes a little. “Come on,” he says. “I’m about to work my magic.”

Tony has provided bugs and small cameras to hide inside Clint and Natasha’s clothing so that the rest of the team can follow what’s happening inside of Pierce’s house. The audio and video quality is astonishing.

There are two guards at the back gate when the van arrives at Pierce’s house. Natasha has sent word to Pierce that there will be two agents accompanying The Soldier, and that’s exactly what the guards seem to be expecting. They barely peek inside to take a look at Yasha and Clint before waving them in.

Natasha parks at the back entrance and she and Clint drag Yasha out of the van. Yasha is shuffling his feet, looking sleepy and confused, and then the door opens and Alexander Pierce comes into view, flanked by three guards.

Pierce looks older in real life than he does in photos, but it’s easy to see how handsome he was when he was younger. He’s oozing easy charisma, but something in his expression sets Steve’s teeth on edge.

Yasha shrinks a fraction between Natasha and Clint; he curls into himself as the guards encircle them to escort them inside.

“I was told that you were killed in the Yekaterinburg ambush,” Pierce says. “I’m glad to see it was just a rumour. I have a lot more work for you to do.” He grabs Yasha’s chin and smiles a tight-lipped smile. Yasha flinches a little at the contact. “You helped us pave the way for Project Insight, and I need you to do it one more time.”

Yasha inclines his head. Pierce looks satisfied and lets go of his face. “Good. You need to be prepped. I’ll send word to have the suit and the chair ready for you in an hour.”

Yasha recoils, and the video feed shakes a little as Clint grips his elbow tighter. “No,” Yasha blurts, panic clear in his voice. Steve doesn’t think that he’s acting. “No. Not-- Not the chair.”

Pierce looks at him with pitying eyes. “My boy, you’ve been away from us for over a year. You won’t be useful to us without a wipe; you already have too much of your own spirit. We need The Soldier, not this...” He waves at Yasha. “...runaway.”

 _A wipe?_ Sam mouths at Steve over the laptop. Steve shakes his head to show that he doesn’t know anything more than Sam. The word is making him uneasy, but he doesn’t know why.

“I hope you still remember your programming, Soldier,” Pierce continues.

 _Programming_ , Sam repeats soundlessly, looking mildly horrified.

Steve notices Natasha’s fingers squeezing Yasha’s elbow, probably to signal something. Yasha doesn’t make a sound.

“Tony,” Natasha whispers into her wrist comm.

Tony types furiously until he’s got the command prompt open, and then his finger hovers over the Enter key. “Piece’s cameras going offline and starting to loop in three,” he says into his microphone.

Pierce is already turning away, waving them inside, but stops and considers something. “Hm,” he says, like an afterthought, and glances back. “Just to be sure: _Sputnik_.”

Yasha goes limp, and Steve shoots up from his chair, because _what the fuck_ , they have to abort the plan _immediately_.

“Now,” Natasha barks into her comm.

Tony slams his hand down on the keyboard, and Sam grabs Steve’s sleeve and pulls him back into his seat, just in time for him to see the scene unravel.

The security guards drop their guns and grab their heads like they’re in pain. Steve suddenly remembers that Tony’s feeding a distorted audio screech into their earpieces, cutting off their comms.

Clint tackles one of the guards and kicks another in the head, and Natasha whips out Bruce’s sedative and sprays Pierce when his back is turned. Pierce goes down, and Clint darts to catch him before he hits the floor. Natasha throws herself on the last guard and has him down faster than Steve can understand what’s happening.

“All right,” Natasha’s clipped voice says through Tony’s computer speakers as Clint gives her the thumbs-up. “We’re clear.”

On Natasha’s video feed, they see Yasha open his eyes and get up slowly from the floor. The docile look is gone from his face, and while he seems troubled, he’s alert.

“Yasha’s fine,” Natasha tells them as she helps him out of the fake shackles. “He told us about the triggers Pierce might try to use. ‘Sputnik’ was one of them, an old shutdown command.”

Natasha’s tone is professional even when she’s throwing words like that around, as if it isn’t strange and terrible to use that kind of language about a human being.

Natasha uses Bruce’s sedative spray on the guards, and Clint and Yasha drag them into the nearby laundry room before carrying Pierce into the van.

“Turning off the feed now, Steve,” Clint says as they close the doors. “We’ll make contact if something happens. See you in thirty.”

The cameras click off, then the audio feed. Sam, Steve, and Bruce let out a huge breath. Even Tony wipes his forehead as he starts to erase the van’s arrival from Pierce’s security camera feed.

“Jeez,” Sam says. He looks a little disgusted. “Pierce gives me the heebie-jeebies. He was talking to Yasha like he was a goddamn robot. _Too much of your own spirit._ Christ Almighty.”

Bruce takes off his glasses and wipes them with the hem of his shirt. His hands are trembling a little, but Steve doesn’t know whether he’s shaken or plain angry. “I’m worried about the technology that would enable Pierce to put triggers in Yasha’s mind. That level of manipulation should be impossible. Brainwashing is a technique as old as any other psychological terrorism, but mechanical brainwashing? Programming a person? That’s something the world should’ve never figured out.”

\----

Thirty minutes later, the van turns into the shop’s parking lot. Yasha is sitting in front next to Natasha. His eyes look large and sunken in his face, but when Steve goes to open the door for him, he seems to snap back into himself and even musters a faint smile.

“No problems?” Steve asks.

Natasha shakes her head as she goes to open the van’s back doors to help Clint and Sam carry Pierce out.

Steve touches Yasha’s shoulder, wanting to make sure he’s okay.

Yasha nods. “I’m fine. I just… I would like to have a shower.”

“We have time for that,” Steve assures him. “Be back in ten minutes.”

While Yasha is away, the rest of them prepare for the extraction. They lift Pierce onto a lawn chair, arrange the PASIV and the rest of the chairs around him, and help Bruce line up their IVs.

Tony packs up the rest of his tech, shakes everybody’s hand, and leaves to prepare for the next morning when he’ll walk into the Triskelion to take down the Helicarriers with the help of Natasha’s friends. He looks a little weary but determined to get the job done.

Thor calls a couple of minutes later - he and two others have come to pick up the van and their cars from the parking lot. Steve goes out to give them the keys and get their new cars for the trip back to New York.

Thor is the same as ever: cheerful, boisterous, and friendly. Steve worked a couple of jobs with him after Bucky died. Thor works mostly as an architect and hired muscle, but he’s also famous for being able to get anything for anyone.

Steve makes a couple of half-hearted promises to call him and catch up before they leave with the cars.

When Steve goes back in, his team is milling around, oozing nervous energy. Clint and Sam are throwing pennies into a plastic cup, and Natasha and Bruce are checking the PASIV and the sedatives for the third time.

Pierce’s unconscious body on one of the deck chairs is the sweatpants-wearing elephant in the room.

Then, Yasha comes back wearing skinny black jeans and a soft grey henley, its sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His damp hair is clean and tied up, and he’s put his glasses back on. He still looks tired and didn’t have time to shave that awful half-beard, but at least the homeless fugitive outfit is gone and he looks like himself again.

There’s a pause while they all stare at him and he stares back. Without the layers that beefed him up, Yasha looks slim and - despite his broad shoulders - almost fragile. He looks at Pierce, and squares his jaw.

Everyone in the room is suddenly very aware of the ghosts Yasha’s been carrying.

Then, Yasha looks each of them in the eyes and says softly, “Let’s fry this bastard.”

\----

When Spencer picks him up from his house, he opens the car door for him and offers his usual, mild, “Good morning, Secretary Pierce.”

It’s a beautiful early November morning, and he’s in a good mood. He slides into the Bentley’s backseat and picks up the coffee Spencer brings him every day. It’s fresh from his favourite shop and still hot. He takes a long sip and hums, content.

His neighbourhood rolls by behind the tinted windows, and he closes his eyes for a short nap while Spencer drives them to the Triskelion. The Soldier’s arrival kept him up late last night, and he’s desperate for some sleep before he has to deal with the Council. He’s passed out within a minute.

\----

Yasha rolls down the partition. When he sees that the sedative has worked, he calls Steve. “Pierce’s asleep. I’m bringing him in,” Yasha tells him and turns the car away from the direction of the Triskelion.

“Roger that,” Steve’s tinny voice says. “We’re ready for you.”

Clint, Sam, Steve, and Natasha are all waiting in a deserted parking garage. They move Pierce into the backseat of the van and get in.

Clint’s driving: he’s staying up on this level and delivering the kick while the rest of them go down to the second level. He knows both the real D.C. and Sam’s version of it like the back of his hand, and he’s an absolutely batshit driver. So it’ll be his job to lead Pierce’s security on a merry chase, before driving the van down the bridge and into the Potomac to kick the team out of the dream.

As soon as they’re buckled up and preparing the IVs, Clint hits the gas and coasts down the ramp to the street. Sam slams into the side of the van and curses a blue streak from where he’s attaching Pierce to the PASIV; he’s the only one not wearing a seatbelt yet.

“Take it easy, man,” he huffs. He throws himself back down onto his seat, buckles his seatbelt, and grabs his needle. “You’ll get us all killed.”

“I’m an excellent driver,” Clint protests and cuts a corner with a little too much speed. Natasha swears in Russian from the front seat and tugs her seatbelt tighter.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam gripes. “Could you just drive straight for one fucking minute so I can get this goddamn IV in? It’s kinda hard when you’re re-enacting Fast and Furious.”

Steve looks over to Yasha, who’s already inserted his IV and is watching Sam and Clint with an amused expression. Then he turns his head a little, catches Steve’s eye and smiles: it’s just a tiny quirk of his lips, but reassuring nevertheless.

“We’re ready,” Steve says. He tears his gaze away from Yasha and gives Clint a nod. “Give ‘em hell.”

Clint salutes, turns the radio on, and keys ‘longing’ - the first of Yasha’s codes - into the GPS. The radio’s playing Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’, and Yasha huffs out a surprised laugh.

“Sweet dreams,” Clint says and reaches for the PASIV’s activation button with his free hand. “Steve, Yasha, try not to get killed. Nat, hope you enjoy hearing ‘The Star-Spangled Man with a Plan’ one last time. Sam, pal, just do your job.”

Sam laughs. “Drive safely, Clinton.”

“Aw, fuck off,” Clint replies good-naturedly and presses the button. The last thing Steve hears before the Somnacin hits is Clint, starting to sing along.

 _The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive_ , indeed.

\----

The second level is the Triskelion: a soaring building on the shore of the Potomac, all gleaming glass and steel. Projections are milling around, most of them wearing formal business attire. The Triskelion makes Steve uncomfortable - it reminds him acutely of all the intelligence agencies that have him on their watchlists.

When the World Security Council arrives, Pierce meets them in the lobby. Steve and Yasha follow their discussion from behind the closest corner, and it’s a relief to see how well Yasha’s split forges are working.

Sam’s hanging around the lobby, keeping an eye out for trouble. Natasha is already at her post, scouting the top floor.

After the pleasantries, Pierce and the council head towards the elevators, flanked by Pierce’s detail. The elevator is designed to keep the projections out as well as possible: Pierce is able to ride it to the top floor, but after that, the floor’s button disappears from the elevator.

“All right, we’re on,” Steve says into his wrist comm and nudges Yasha towards the stairs. “Natasha, find the safe. Sam, relocate to the control room. If you use any of the codes, let us know. Break a leg.”

Since the stairwell is a Penrose staircase, Steve and Yasha can’t walk up it. So Steve links his hands together and hoists Yasha up into the air duct - Sam’s paradoxical masterpiece. It’s a horizontal tunnel through the vertical skyscraper, a shortcut through the maze. Sam’s proud of it for a reason.

Yasha lowers a knotted rope down to Steve, and Steve climbs up and closes the trapdoor behind him. It’s designed to hide the air duct from anyone who doesn’t know that it’s there, and even Yasha - who’s rehearsed this several times - had to feel around a little to find it. Steve’s confident that with Sam’s design, Pierce’s projections will be securely kept out of the top floor.

They crawl quietly through the tunnel, shuffling on their hands and knees. Steve’s fervently praying that Bucky stays away on this job. He knows that Natasha will keep her promise: she, Sam, and Yasha are ready to shoot Bucky on-sight if his ghost appears. Their final test run taught them the necessity of that.

They emerge from the air duct on the top floor, on the other side of the building from the council room. Yasha slides into Brock Rumlow’s skin and checks his cellphone as Steve presses a finger on his wrist comm and says quietly, “We’re through. Natasha, situation report.”

“Council gathered, champagne poured, asses currently being kissed,” she replies. “The forges are working really well. I’ve located the safe and I’ll make my way to it once you and Yasha reach the council room. We’re looking for a nine-digit passcode for the safe. Sam, I’m ready when you are.”

“I’m in position,” Sam’s voice confirms. “Starting the recording now.”

They wait in silence. Then the intercom crackles to life, and Steve’s recorded voice booms through the building.

“Attention, all SHIELD agents, this is Steve Rogers. Some of you may know me as Captain America. Ten years ago, you would’ve seen me as the face of the War on Terror. And some of you might know me from Project Oneiros.”

Steve and Yasha stare at each other quietly, as Steve’s voice drones on. Steve feels a little embarrassed about the speech, but outing himself to Pierce is their way into the council room. Hopefully, it will keep the projections occupied for some time too. Captain America was merely propaganda, so if Steve did this in the real Triskelion, he would have zero authority over the agents, but Pierce’s mind will likely recognize his name.

“I left the Army, because I didn’t believe in the war our country was waging. I would’ve stayed gone, too, if not for the recent news.”

On the recording, Steve takes a deep breath. “SHIELD is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by HYDRA, and Alexander Pierce is their leader. I don't know how many SHIELD agents are HYDRA, but I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you. If you launch those helicarriers today, HYDRA will be able to kill anyone who stands in their way.”

There’s a short silence. Yasha’s face is carefully neutral, betraying nothing. Then, Steve’s voice continues. “I may be a relic of the past, but I’m not gonna watch terrorists make a nest inside our country’s most hallowed institutions. HYDRA has already taken so much - they’ve taken the stability of our world, our security and freedom, and they are so close to taking away the people we love. The price of freedom is high, and it always has been. It's a price I'm willing to pay, even if I'm the only one. But I'm willing to bet I'm not.”

The recording falls silent.

“Nice speech, Captain America,” Natasha says through the comms. “You almost live up to your name. Time to get on with the plan.”

Yasha snorts, and Steve checks the time. “Sam, how’s the situation downstairs? Are the projections still behaving?”

“Things are heating up,” Sam tells them. “I had to use the code ‘return to homeland’.”

“Okay. Let us know if things get too hot,” Yasha says. He turns his earpiece mic off and turns to Steve. “I’m going to punch you now,” he says.

Steve nods, and Yasha throws a right hook that catches him on the cheekbone. It’s not hard enough to knock him out, but it hurts like a motherfucker and will leave a nasty mark.

“You okay?” Yasha asks as he pulls out his cell phone and texts Pierce, _SR captured._

Steve touches the swelling under his eye and winces a little. “Yeah. You pack a mean punch.”

Yasha snorts again. “I pulled that punch and you know it.”

A text from Pierce buzzes his cell: _Bring him up._

They make their way silently towards the other end of the floor, Yasha taking point and Steve following. They’re almost at their destination when Steve rounds a corner and bumps into Yasha’s Kevlar-clad back.

Yasha has stopped and is staring into an open doorway to their left. He looks like he’s seeing a ghost. It’s an unsettling expression on Rumlow’s rough, forged features.

“What is it?” Steve whispers. Yasha doesn’t reply, so Steve leans over to look into the room.

The first thing Steve notices is the chair. It’s large and menacing, made of old leather and rusty metal, and the thick restraints are open like greedy mouths. There’s blood crusted on the place where Yasha’s arm would be held down, and the side that would hold his left arm is made not of leather, but metal.

The worst is the headgear, looming over the chair like a hungry bird of prey.

Next to the chair is a PASIV - an older, beaten-up model with tubes spilling out of it, the Somnacin in them a sickening green. For a second, Steve thinks he sees the black-clad man from their test run in the chair, curved like a bow under an electrical current, but he blinks, and the room’s empty again.

Yasha’s hands are squeezed so tightly into fists that his knuckles are turning pale. Steve reaches out and touches his shoulder softly, startling him. “What’s wrong?”

Yasha drops the forge, and the expression on his face is startling - it’s open and vulnerable, clearly terrified. He’s breathing through his nose slowly. Finally, he clears his throat. “You remember when I asked you about Limbo?” he says, his voice breaking and his accent thickening.

Steve makes an affirmative noise, and Yasha’s mouth trembles, then twists into a grimace. This is the first time Steve’s seen him show any emotion when talking about his past.

Yasha turns away from the door, and Steve closes it so that they don’t have to look at the chair anymore.

“I asked about losing yourself in Limbo,” Yasha says in Rumlow’s voice again. He’s turned away from Steve, and his back is tight like a coiled spring. “What they did to me was worse than that.”

“Is this… is this what they did to you?” Steve asks, hating the answer already. “What Pierce said, about the chair and… a wipe?”

Yasha nods tersely but doesn’t elaborate. “Let’s get moving.” He checks the time and taps his earpiece. “Sam, I accidentally caused a bleed in the architecture; you might need to use a code.”

Sam replies, “Your trigger-happy guardian angel has appeared at the Insight Bay, but other than that we’re good. He’s kinda terrifying, by the way. I’ll keep you updated.”

Steve’s heart is beating madly - he’s close, so close to getting his revenge on Pierce, if they can just break into the safe and get the information they need first. Yasha looks as cool as a cucumber, but his left trigger finger is twitching on the grip of his M4 assault rifle, and Steve knows he’s nervous.

“Hey,” Steve says, and on impulse, raises his hand to touch Yasha’s cheek. “Good luck.”

“You too, Steve.” Yasha’s face bleeds through the forge, like he knows that Steve longs to see something familiar, and he squeezes Steve’s bicep reassuringly with his right hand. Yasha’s expression is kind and a little fond, and Steve stops thinking, cups Yasha’s neck, and pulls him up into a kiss.

 

Yasha stiffens for a second, then sighs into Steve’s mouth and kisses back, his mouth sweet and soft.

It’s ill-timed, and it should be awkward and terrible. They’re standing in the hallway, two doors away from the man who ruined Steve’s life, and Sam can probably see everything from the monitors in the control room.

Yasha is gripping an assault rifle with his left hand and Steve’s arm with his right. He’s craning up awkwardly to meet Steve’s lips, and Steve’s bent at a weird angle.

But then Yasha steps closer, tilts his head, and opens his mouth, and suddenly kissing him is the best and easiest thing Steve has done in the past four years.

When they part, short of breath and blinking under the fluorescent lights, Yasha’s smile is definitely fond and a little amused. His pale eyes look darker than usual. “You,” he says and taps Steve’s forehead with his finger, “have the worst timing.”

“I know,” Steve laughs, abashed, then turns around and lets Yasha handcuff him.

Yasha clicks the cuffs closed with practised ease, then comes around to face Steve once more. He’s still wearing Rumlow’s black t-shirt and Kevlar vest, but he’s back in his own body under the borrowed attire, and his hair is pulled up into a ridiculous, high bun. Steve’s flustered by the flare of desire he feels at seeing Yasha’s gleaming metal fingers grip the assault rifle.

Yasha smiles crookedly. “Nah,” he says, “I like your terrible timing.” He fists Steve’s shirt, leans in and kisses him again on the mouth, dirty and lingering. “This doesn’t change anything, Steve. You still have until New Year’s to get your head straightened out. Now, let’s go shoot something.”

Yasha slings the rifle over his shoulder, pulls out a Sig Sauer, and moves to get behind Steve. “Going in,” he says into his earpiece mic in Rumlow’s voice and nudges Steve towards the council room. “Natasha, relocate. Sam, sitrep.”

“Get me a nine digit passcode for the safe,” Natasha reminds them. “I’ll be waiting. Good luck.”

“Projections are getting antsy,” Sam says. “I’m putting in another code.”

“Use ‘soldat’,” Yasha suggests. “For some reason, it usually works a little longer than the others.”

“Code in,” Sam replies after a beat. “You’re up.”

“Wish us luck,” Yasha says. He grips Steve’s arm with his left hand, and marches him into the council room.

Pierce, the four World Security Council forges, and the two security guard projections turn to look at them when they enter. “Ah, Captain Rogers,” Pierce greets him, unable to keep the smug smile from his face. “An honor to meet the man who’s had the intelligence community running around in circles for years.”

“Secretary Pierce,” Steve replies calmly. “I’m afraid I can’t share the sentiment.”

Pierce looks amused and turns to the council. “This man tried to stop us from changing the world for the better some years ago. Resilience is a noble trait, isn’t it?” He looks back at Steve while playing idly with his empty champagne chute. “It’s kind of fitting, Captain: The last time you tried to stand in my way, you gave up your poor boyfriend and gained nothing. This time you’re sacrificing yourself, and it will still amount to absolutely nothing.”

Steve flinches involuntarily at the mention of Bucky. Yasha tightens his hold and squeezes Steve’s forearm a little.

“Don’t be so sure,” Steve says easily. “I’m not alone.”

“STRIKE is hunting down your friends, _Captain_ ,” Yasha says in Rumlow’s voice. “You’re going to fail. The Asset has been brought in. SHIELD agents are nothing compared to _him_.”

“Who is ‘The Asset’?” Steve asks, and makes himself frown.

Pierce laughs. “Oh, Captain,” he says, smirking. “You have no idea. I’m going to enjoy seeing your face when you meet him. I’ll let you witness the rise of HYDRA, and then The Soldier will kill you. Maybe we’ll tell him the truth about you, too, after he’s put a bullet in your head.”

“Wait, so all this talk about-- about world domination isn’t just bragging?” Rockwell’s projection butts in and points an accusing finger at Pierce. “If this guy is Captain America, isn’t he a war hero? And you want to _kill_ him? I’d rather trust him than you and your fancy words about peace through violence.”

Pierce laughs again, an ugly edge to his tone. “A war hero, you say? Let’s check.” Pierce taps the computer and pulls Steve’s FBI file and military records up on the screen. “You see, Mr. Rockwell, this man who claims to fight terrorism is in fact a wanted criminal. He hasn’t spent a day of his life in a warzone. You sure you want this man walking around freely?”

Steve stares at his records. The information is correct, and it’s a bit creepy that Pierce knows it so well that he’s able to project the records accurately in the dream.

“Your Social Security number,” Yasha breathes into Steve’s ear, and presses his own earpiece to activate his mic while Pierce’s attention is elsewhere. “It has nine digits. Natasha, get ready.”

The council is arguing with Pierce and each other, their voices getting louder. Yasha is breathing steadily behind Steve.

The familiar numbers flicker, like a glitch. Then they flicker again and rearrange themselves into a different order as Pierce’s mind tries to hide the code. Suddenly, Steve understands.

“754-02-1387,” Yasha whispers.

After a short silence, Natasha’s voice comes through Steve’s earpiece. “I’m in.”

Yasha opens Steve’s handcuffs very, very quietly and presses the pistol into his hand. “Do you want to do the honors?” he whispers.

Steve shakes his head, just a tiny movement, and whispers back, lips barely moving, “You deserve it.” He doesn’t say _you deserve everything_ , but he thinks that Yasha hears it anyway, because he covers Steve’s hands with his own and squeezes.

Then Natasha’s voice says, alarmed, “Steve, some of the information in these files is redacted. I think Pierce knows we’re here. I’ve read all I can. Thankfully, there’s still a lot of relevant data, but you’d better get busy.”

Steve freezes, and Yasha inhales sharply, surprised. This means that Pierce has to be aware that he’s in a dream, and is stalling them by playing along.

“-but the safety of our country,” Rockwell’s angry voice says, getting louder, and Steve tunes back into the debate Yasha was using as a diversion.

“Oh, this is getting dull,” Pierce sighs and taps the screen on his phone.

The visitor badges the council members have clipped to their chests start to spark. Rockwell screams first, and then the whole council is falling, holes burnt into their sternums.

Steve can feel Yasha tense behind him, and it occurs to him that Yasha must’ve felt the pain through his forges. But his forge of Rumlow doesn’t slip, and Steve aches with the knowledge of why Yasha can stand so much pain.

“You can stop pretending, Captain,” Pierce says in a bored voice. The security guards point their guns at Steve and Yasha. “I’m very aware that you’re trying to extract information from me.”

Steve clenches his jaw and presses his wrist comm so that Natasha and Sam can listen in. “How did you know?” he says.

Pierce goes to the computer and pulls up the security camera feed from the Insight Bay. Sam was right: Yasha’s projection is ruthless and terrifying, and he’s dispatching projections with machine-like efficiency.

“The Soldier’s appearance on my doorstep was very convenient,” Pierce says. “We thought he was dead, after all. I knew that he’d worked in dreamsharing before he came to us, but seeing him here confirmed my suspicions. And I don’t remember arriving at the Triskelion today, only falling asleep in my car.”

He looks past Steve at Yasha, smiles nastily and says, “Hello, _Soldat_.”

“Fuck you,” Yasha replies, bristling a little. He lets go of Steve’s hands, steps forward to stand next to him, and grips the assault rifle tighter.

One of Pierce’s security guards turns the safety off on his gun with an audible click, but Yasha’s stance doesn’t falter.

Pierce chuckles. “I admire your skills, Soldier - your forge of Rumlow is very accurate. I’m very pleased that you’ll soon be working for us again.”

Yasha tenses, and Steve asks, “What do you mean?”

Pierce waves his hand imperially. “My car has a tracker. My security is only waiting for me to wake up, and then they’ll kill the rest of you and take The Soldier. HYDRA didn’t spend years in dreamtime training him for nothing. We’ll wipe him and put him to work.”

“Steve,” Natasha says hurriedly into the comm. “He doesn’t seem to know that he’s two levels deep; we’re probably safe. Shoot him and get on with it. We need to set the explosives for the kick.”

“I suppose we’ll have to program new triggers in you,” Pierce muses, pointing at Yasha. “Since ‘sputnik’ and the others have clearly been removed.”

“Burn in hell,” Yasha snarls, unfreezing from his rigid stance. “I’ll show you a trigger.”

Before Steve or the guards can react, Yasha lifts and aims the assault rifle almost unnaturally fast. He shoots the guards first, then Pierce, sending him down into Limbo. They’re all clear headshots, frighteningly accurate for the speed with which they were executed.

“Oh my god,” Sam’s voice blurts in Steve’s ear, in a slightly hysteric tone, “that was so fucking dramatic.”

“Get on with the plan,” Steve orders and switches his wrist comm off.

The bodies of the dead council members fade away. Yasha shifts back into his own body, and stares at the gun in his hands. “It’s done,” he says, in a strange, distant voice.

Steve reaches out, just about to close his hand around Yasha’s shoulder and pull him in, when a shot rings out, and Yasha jerks forward and collapses, faster than Steve can catch him. When Yasha’s body hits the ground, Steve can see the round bullet hole in his neck and the dark puddle starting to grow underneath him.

“Hi, baby,” says a familiar voice behind him, and when Steve turns, Bucky lowers his pistol.

Bucky isn’t smirking now, and the insane gleam is gone from his eyes. He puts the gun down on the floor and walks to Steve. It’s the first time Yasha and Bucky’s ghost have been in the same room.

“Why did you do that?” Steve asks, helpless and unable to lift his gun.

Bucky is wearing one of Steve’s own plaid shirts and a pair of jeans. His hair is fluffy and askew, as if he just woke up. The engagement ring is still on his finger - a glinting reminder of loss.

“Because this is something you need to figure out, pal,” Bucky tells him and leans in, lays his head on Steve’s shoulder. “If you’re gonna go to Vyborg for New Year’s, you have to let me go.”

Steve’s throat closes up, and he can’t help but put his arm around Bucky’s waist and pull him closer. He breathes in the birch shampoo Bucky loved, and his heart feels suddenly too big and aching in his chest. “What do you mean?”

Bucky sighs against him, laughs a little. He sounds oddly happy. “I’ve been asking you to let me go for a long goddamn time, Steve. You just haven’t been listening - I can’t deal with you coming and going all the time. I’m not going to sit on my ass down here waiting for you forever.” He pats Steve’s chest with his hand. “You kissed him, Steve. You’re finally giving me up, and that’s good. That’s _good_ , baby. I told you to live, didn’t I?”

“Steve? Yasha? What’s going on?” demands Natasha’s voice in Steve’s earpiece. “Stop having a moment, I need you to get moving.”

Bucky steps back and smiles. It’s wide and lopsided and so _young_ that it hurts. Bucky’s ghost hasn’t aged a day, and Steve feels ancient. “You have to follow him down,” Bucky says. “Find him. And stay the fuck away from Pierce.”

“You’re not coming?” Steve stammers, ignoring Natasha’s questions.

Bucky shakes his head. “This is goodbye, Steve. We had a good ride, but it’s over. You’ve grieved enough.” He points at the Sig Sauer in Steve’s trembling hand. “Take the gun and hurry up, you don’t have much time until the kick.”

Steve grips his gun a little tighter and takes a good, long look at Bucky, from the tip of his wild hair down to his red Converse. “I love you,” he says, helplessly, then corrects himself, “I loved you.”

“I know,” Bucky replies, because he was a huge nerd as well as the love of Steve’s life. “I loved you too. We lived a good life together.” He taps Steve’s chest with his finger, grinning a little. “Anyone can see what a terrible fucking mess you are, Rogers. But you were my mess, and now you’re his. You'll be all right. Live, motherfucker. Be happy. You deserve to.”

Bucky’s smiling when Steve cups his face with his free hand and presses the gun against his chest. The shot echoes in the room, and when Steve lets Bucky’s body fall, he realizes his hands aren’t trembling anymore.

“Steve, Yasha, situation report _now_ ,” Natasha barks into his ear, and Steve finally re-activates his wrist comm.

“Bucky was here,” Steve says. He feels oddly calm. “He got Yasha before we even noticed him. I’m following Yasha down to bring him back.”

Natasha curses in Russian. Then she says, “Steve, you can’t, there isn’t time for that. The kick is coming soon.”

“Down there, there’s nothing but time,” Steve replies. “I’m not leaving him behind, Natasha. Trust me on this.”

She sighs. “Fine. Be careful. I expect to see both of you up top.”

“Go get him, man,” Sam says, his voice kind. “He’s worth the risk.”

Steve almost cracks a smile. “Yeah,” he says and clears his throat a little. “Use the last of Yasha’s codes and finish setting the explosives. We’ll ride the kick back up through the levels.” He presses the muzzle of the gun under his chin and thinks about the soft press of Yasha’s lips against his. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

He clicks his wrist comm off and pulls the trigger, and the world falls away around him.

\----

Steve wakes up on the beach.

His clothes are waterlogged and heavy, but he knows they’ll dry quicker than they would up top. Hietaniemi beach is empty, and he splashes onto the shore and starts making his way across the sand. Across the road on his right looms the cemetery, old and abandoned, and behind the cemetery’s pines he can see the towers of Angkor Wat, the faces from Bayon crumbling and weather-beaten.

He passes through the _torii_ gates, past the decrepit minigolf and the decaying ice cream stall, stepping over fallen cherry blossoms. He picks one up and holds it in his palm, wet and fragile. The sky is cloudy and grey, and the only noise he can hear is the waves crashing against the shore and the gulls screaming.

He doesn’t know where Yasha is, but his gut is tugging him in a certain direction.

Cafe Regatta is still standing, but the door is closed and barred, and half of the letters over the door have fallen off. There’s somebody sitting in a rickety terrace chair close to the waterfront, his back to Steve and his face towards the sea. His dark hair is pulled back into a bun, and relief floods through Steve, sharp and sudden. He walks closer, and Yasha turns.

But it’s not him.

It’s Bucky.

He has Yasha’s long hair, and Steve can see the faint impression of Yasha’s tattoos and his metal arm under his shirt. But the rest of him is all Bucky, just like the one Steve left one level up. He’s got Bucky’s sharp, clean-shaven jawline, the dimple in his chin, and the soft hint of mischief in the corner of his mouth. He’s not wearing glasses, and his eyes are sea-grey and lovely in the gloomy light.

“Hey, Steve,” he greets him when Steve stops in his tracks. “I was waiting for you.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, “you weren’t supposed to be here.” He isn’t expecting the confused frown he gets in return.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” Yasha asks, and Steve feels lightheaded, like all the blood is rushing out of it.

Steve stumbles forward, collapses into the chair next to Yasha. The wind smells like salt and seaweed. “You,” he swallows, something raw and desperate in his voice. “You are. You’re James Buchanan Barnes, born in New York in 1982.”

“I’m Yakov Kuznetsov from Vyborg, Steve,” Yasha reminds him gently, but there’s hesitation in his eyes, and the soft Russian lilt of his accent is nowhere to be heard. He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

“Are you sure?” Steve presses, and Yasha shakes his head, slowly.

“My head is full of holes,” Yasha says softly, and Steve remembers something he thought a long time ago about Bucky: kissed by a shotgun. “There aren’t many things I’ve been sure about, these past few years.”

Steve reaches over instinctively and takes Yasha’s hand. They sit in silence for a moment and watch the sea. The wind throws drops of salty water on them.

“Say it again,” Yasha pleads, then. “Who you think I am. Say it again.”

Steve squeezes his hand. “Your name is James Barnes,” he murmurs. “You’ve been my whole life for twenty-five years. I asked you to marry me in front of this café four years ago, before I lost you in Moscow.”

Yasha stares at their entwined hands and looks up at Steve slowly, takes his time looking at him. “You love me,” he says finally, his voice laced with wonder. He shakes his head a little. “You’re familiar. You’re familiar like something constant, but I don’t _know_ you.”

“You know me, Bucky,” Steve says, his voice cracking and his skin too tight. “You’ve known me your whole life.”

Yasha looks around, his gaze lingering on the decaying hut, the rusted gate in front of the kayaking club.

“I think I recognize this place,” he confesses, and there it is: the slightest drawl of Brooklyn and fire escapes and _home_ in his voice. “I’ve forgotten a lot of things. I gave a lot of things away. But I never gave up this one.” He hesitates. “They-- they made good pastries, right?”

“They do,” Steve says and feels like he’s choking on something. “You love their cinnamon rolls and taking a tuk-tuk to the Angkor ruins. You love nice clothes and insulting me and-- and Yoshinoya’s _gyudon_ \--”

“And you,” Yasha finishes softly. “I must’ve loved you.”

Steve nods, but words don’t come.

Yasha lets go of his hand, gets up, and walks to the cafe’s door. With his left hand, he easily tugs off the planks nailed across the front door and goes inside. Steve follows him into the cramped, dusty hut, dodging the cobwebs and miscellaneous hanging bric-a-brac, and watches Yasha approach the till.

“I put something away,” Yasha murmurs, more to himself than Steve, staring down at the old-fashioned cash register. “They chased me down here, but they never found it, and then I forgot the way back here.”

Yasha pries the till open very gently with his mechanical fingers. Inside is a faded, folded piece of sketching paper, a creased 1,000 Cambodian riel note, a pair of dog tags, and a single Helsinki tram ticket, dated July 24th 2011.

Yasha picks up the piece of sketching paper with a trembling hand and unfolds it. He stares at it for a while, before picking up the dog tags to read what’s inscribed on them. His lips move silently as he reads the name, and then he makes a low, animal-like sound, almost a sob, and drops them like they’ve burnt him.

His knees give out, and Steve darts forward to catch him, pulls him in tightly, and holds him through the shivers. The piece of sketching paper is sitting on the counter and Steve picks it up, rubbing circles on Yasha’s back with his thumb. Outside the hut the wind is picking up, signaling the approaching kick, and Yasha is trembling under his touch, bird-boned and falling apart.

It’s one of the drawings Steve sent to Bucky when he was stationed in Germany: it shows the two of them laughing, heads bent together, Bucky’s arm thrown over Steve’s skinny shoulders. Underneath is written in Steve’s handwriting, _Eat a bratwurst, asshat_. It’s such an unexpected thing for Bucky to remember that it startles a laugh out of Steve.

(Bucky had written back, _Thanks for the drawing, punk. I can proudly say that I’ve followed your order to a T several times and enjoyed myself very much._ Steve had tried to not be jealous and failed spectacularly.)

“Steve,” Bucky chokes against his neck, both hands fisting his shirt. “Jesus, _Steve._ ” It’s like he’s saying it for the first time; like he finally knows the true weight of the name on his tongue.

Steve’s mouth feels like it’s full of cotton when he swallows and says, “Yeah, Buck. It’s me; I’m here. You’re safe.”

Out of the window, Steve can see the wooden bridge and the collapsed and rotting roofs of the kayaking club’s boathouses. It feels strange yet comforting to think that somewhere, up in the real world and over four thousand miles away, the modest buildings are still standing and people are stepping carefully into their kayaks from the jetty.

Bucky makes a soft sound against Steve’s shirt, and Steve thinks how nice it would be to rent a kayak in the summer and take Bucky to the southwest corner of Finland, sit close to the water and point out unfamiliar birds. They could sleep in a tent pitched on a soft carpet of brown pine needles. They’d wake up to the early sun and the smell of salt, drink coffee on the warm, sea-smoothed cliffs. Steve only saw the archipelago of Turku briefly, back in 2007, when they’d caught the ferry from Naantali to Sweden, but he’s dreamed of going back ever since.

He’s jerked out of his thoughts when a huge crash shakes the cafe; the kick is coming, and their time is running out.

Steve looks down at Bucky, who’s finally stopped shivering. It’s exhilarating to have him in his arms - the thrill of the stolen kiss in the Triskelion’s hallway and the weight of years of loving him combined.

Steve tilts Bucky’s face up with his hand and drops a kiss at the corner of his mouth. “That’s the kick, baby. Come back with me.”

 _Come back with me_ , he thinks. He kisses Bucky again and then tucks him under his chin, presses his cheek against Bucky’s soft, dark hair. _Come back and grow old with me again, this time for real._

Bucky exhales, wet and tired, and rests his head against Steve’s neck. “Okay,” he says, and the world comes crashing down around them.

Steve holds him close as the waves rise out of the sea and crash through the doorway to swallow them, and they wake up.

\----

When Steve comes to in the warehouse, he immediately looks over to Yasha, who’s already awake and staring back, eyes clear. Then Yasha - _Bucky_ , because he _is_ Bucky, Steve isn’t dreaming, _he isn’t dreaming_ \- swallows, rubs his head a little and hesitantly cracks a smile.

 _There you are,_ Steve thinks, suddenly giddy with joy. _Welcome home, Buck._

“All clear?” Natasha asks, a worried crease between her eyes, and Steve turns to her and nods, relief making his blood sing.

Clint and Sam are already wiping their fingerprints off of the PASIV and detaching Pierce from it.

Natasha is typing furiously on her phone, passing the information she got from the safe to her contacts at SHIELD. She gives Steve and the others a short, clipped summary of the data as she types: even though some of it was blacked out, Natasha managed to get the names of the top HYDRA agents in SHIELD, passcodes to bypass file encryptions, and some information about HYDRA’s current terrorist connections in the Middle East. Hopefully, with that information, Tony and Natasha’s friends can put an end to Project Insight.

The team is quiet while they clear the shop, still in a professional and detached mood. Once they’re done cleaning up, Natasha, Sam, and Clint leave the room, and Bruce gathers his vials and follows them out.

When the shop is empty, Bucky glances at Steve before stepping up to Pierce. He pulls his metal arm back, curls his fingers into a fist, and decks Pierce across the face. The grace and swiftness of his left hook is familiar from alleyways past.

There’s a sickening crunch, and then Bucky turns, grabs his bag, and walks to the bathroom without a word.

Steve checks the shop again while he waits, pockets a lonely earplug left from Sam’s nap, and tries to not think about anything. Pierce’s breathing is noisy, something gurgling in his throat, and Steve tries to block it out.

Bucky comes out of the bathroom ten minutes later without his glasses, clean-shaven, and wearing a leather jacket over his henley. He jerks his head towards the door and leaves, not waiting for Steve.

When Steve catches up to him in the parking lot, Bucky’s standing next to their car, clenching and unclenching his hands. Steve approaches him, and Bucky looks up, his eyes familiar and anxious, and Steve can’t help himself.

He strides to the car, drops his bag, grabs Bucky by the waist, and reels him in tightly. It surprises a laugh out Bucky, and then they’re hugging, tight and real.

Steve breathes in Bucky’s warmth and breathes out the four long years he’s lived without him. Bucky’s arms around his shoulders feel like a life vest, solid and comforting. They’re pressed together from head to toe, as if trying to get impossibly closer, fuse into one; Steve’s pretty sure both of them are crying.

“Hey, asshole,” Bucky laughs wetly next to his ear. “Long time no see.”

\----

They stop at a diner and order breakfast, staring at each other over the table. Bucky’s ankle is pressed against Steve’s under the table, radiating warmth.

It’s strange, sitting in the booth with him. Steve’s been holding onto his grief for so long, and now he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s a little fucked up too, knowing that the attraction he felt towards Yasha was just him crushing on his not-actually-dead boyfriend. It’s confusing and it makes Steve’s head hurt.

When the waitress comes, Bucky checks the list briefly before ordering hashbrowns and oatmeal with blueberries. Before, he would’ve ordered pancakes and scrambled eggs. It’s a palpable example of how he’s not the same person Steve knew, and it feels a little like a slap.

Then again, Steve isn’t the same person, either. Bucky lost his identity and Steve grew old with a ghost, and neither of them came back from that unscathed.

He wonders what the hell they’re supposed to do now. They’ll have to explain this to the rest of their team, and Steve wants to know what happened to Bucky after Moscow. And after that? It’s hard to say where they stand, and Steve hopes they can make it work.

When the food comes, Steve realizes he’s ravenous. He hasn’t eaten since they got takeout somewhere around 1 a.m. and it’s now 6:30 a.m. The adrenaline and the nerves must have kept the hunger at bay. He practically inhales his breakfast and then orders coffee refills to pass the time, while Bucky eats at a more sedate pace.

Bucky eats like a bird: he takes a bite here and there, and pauses often to savour it. It’s endearing to watch, because that’s how he’s always eaten, since he was a kid. Bucky’s quiet, so there’s no way of knowing if he still speaks with his mouth full. Steve hopes he does; it’s a disgusting habit and Steve absolutely adores it.

The diner is quiet and sleepy, and if there weren’t a brand new tv screen on the wall, Steve would swear the place was frozen in time, maybe the sixties. Bucky’s metal hand is deft with the fork, and Steve thinks that they’re like time travelers, dropped here from the future.

Then Bucky looks up and smiles, almost hesitant, and Steve is floored again by how stunning and vibrant he is, even under the fluorescent lights that make everyone else look ill. _No_ , he thinks and presses his ankle more firmly against Bucky’s, _we’re_ _not stuck in the past; the only way we’re moving is forward._

\----

When they get back in the car, it’s a little past 7 a.m. Steve turns on the radio and they listen to it in silence, Bucky humming along softly to the music.

The music breaks for a news brief, and Steve tunes to NPR. Washington D.C. is in chaos: SHIELD headquarters are a mess, thousands of classified files have been dumped online, and government officials and politicians are being arrested left and right. Tony and Natasha’s friends have obviously been busy with the extracted information.

The Project Insight helicarriers never made it into the air - it’s estimated that over 6 million lives were spared. Secretary Pierce is being named as the project’s mastermind.

Leaving Pierce to slowly drown in his own blood or starve in a coma might’ve been an inhumane way to kill him. But as Steve listens to the information being leaked and sneaks glances towards Bucky in shotgun, he really, really can’t bring himself to feel bad about it. Bucky always has brought out both the best and the worst in him.

Eventually, Steve turns the radio down. “Something happened to you,” he says, steeling himself. “How are you even here? That explosion in Moscow wasn’t something you walk away from.”

Bucky looks down, flexes his metal hand. He’s curled up on the seat, hunched into himself. “It’s a really fucking long story.”

“We still have a little over three hours of driving ahead of us,” Steve reminds him. “Tell me.”

“War,” Bucky says then, softly. “War happened to me first.” He hesitates. “You remember I was a POW in Iraq, right? I know my ma must’ve told you, even though you and I never talked about it. I never told anyone, but the people who got me-- They experimented on me. I’m pretty sure they gave me the botched version of the same shit you got for Rebirth.”

Bucky shakes his head, gestures towards his torso. “After that I healed quicker and saw better in the dark than before. I was faster than I used to be, but nothing that’d make me really stand out. That’s the only way to explain how the hell I survived getting blown up.”

Steve grips the steering wheel a little tighter, and it gives a soft groan under the pressure. Bucky leans over and puts a hand on his forearm. “Are you sure you want to hear this while you’re driving?”

Steve exhales loudly, forces his grip to loosen a little. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m listening.”

“They found me, in Moscow,” Bucky tells him. “HYDRA. I don’t know how or when, but they knew who I was-- remember Karpov, the architect on that job? He was HYDRA. They took me, and put me under. They wanted to know about you, and that’s something I wasn’t ready to give up.”

He fiddles with the hem of his shirt. “I hid from them in Limbo, built a hasty version of Helsinki to lose them in. I locked my identity away down there so that I’d forget who I was, so that I’d forget you. I thought, fuck it, even if I never remember myself again at least they won’t get their hands on _you_.”

Steve’s eyes are burning, and he reaches over, turns his palm up, and waits until Bucky slips his cold left hand into it.

“I kept the only thing I could,” Bucky says quietly, rubs Steve’s hand with his thumb. “I kept the knowledge that somebody had loved me, once. But they took that, too.”

They’re quiet for a while. Bucky shivers a little and turns the heat up a few degrees.

“When they realized there was nothing in me to tell, they decided to just… start over. That’s when the chair came in.” Bucky visibly hesitates again. Steve squeezes his hand a little tighter, and Bucky’s jaw clenches as he grits his teeth together. Steve turns the radio on again, and they listen to a couple of songs while Bucky breathes steadily through his nose and calms down.

“You saw the chair,” Bucky says.

Steve nods dumbly.

Bucky’s mouth twists into a bitter, pained grimace. “I went in as a person and came out as a blank slate. The chair messes with your head - it wipes your fucking memory, and after that they can hook you up to a computer and _program_ you, like a robot. The memories would come back after a while, in a jumbled mess, so they’d wipe me again and again. Then, they’d use me as they wanted.”

He lets go of Steve’s hand and curls tighter into himself. His voice is very small and very young. “I worked for them as an assassin and an extractor for over two years. They forced me to militarize Pierce, because they knew I was the best they could get their hands on. At least it was before the chair, so I had the presence of mind to botch the job.”

Bucky raises his left hand and wiggles his fingers. The arm makes a soft, whirring sound. “They gave me this arm, put a rifle in my hand, and told me to kill people. I did as I was told; I didn’t know any better. On a good day, I might’ve remembered something from my life before I was The Soldier, but it was always foggy, and gone with the next wipe. They liked their Soldier to be clean.”

Steve’s hands are properly shaking now, and the car swerves, enough to make them both jump.

“Pull over, Steve,” Bucky orders, an edge of the old steel in his voice. “I’m driving.”

Steve does as he’s told and pulls into the next rest stop, climbs into shotgun feeling like he’s been scraped raw.

Bucky goes to the vending machines and comes back with two bottles of water and a Milky Way bar for Steve. It’s been Steve’s favourite candy bar for twenty years, and the gesture is endearingly thoughtful.

Bucky slips into the driver’s seat and curses in Finnish and Russian at the automatic transmission. It’s a comfortingly familiar outburst - Bucky’s always liked manual, the soft churning of switching gears when he drives.

Bucky navigates the car back into traffic, his right hand hovering over the gear shift like he’s waiting to change gears as soon as he hits the right speed. He fiddles with the radio until he finds a station that plays heavy, dirty rap, and leaves it on. Steve tries to count how many times the artist swears; concentrating on something else helps a little.

“How did you get out?” Steve asks when they’ve been driving for fifteen minutes and he’s chugged down a whole bottle of water.

“I’m not sure, exactly,” Bucky says, frowning. “Guess I just got lucky. It was April 2014. They had to wipe me pretty often by then, because I was getting antsy and distracted very easily. So Pierce sent me back to the test facility in Russia, probably to see if they could shape me back into what he wanted. They put me in the chair and were prepping me when the alarm sounded and everybody scrambled. I was scared and nobody was paying me any attention, so I grabbed my file from the table and fled.”

Steve frowns. “Was it SHIELD?”

Bucky snorts. “Hell, no. Turns out it was SOBR, a _spetsnaz_ unit. I found out later that they were raiding the place thinking they’d find drug traffickers, but they found HYDRA’s test labs instead. Gave the bunch of them nightmares for a long time.”

“Huh,” Steve says, “I would’ve thought that those guys were HYDRA, too.”

Bucky smiles a little. “Me too, but no. I managed to walk to Yekaterinburg, and I found a guy to help me remove the triggers from my head. Then, I got rid of him and moved to Vyborg, thinking that I had to have a skeleton of a personality somewhere in me, a foundation to build upon. That’s how Yakov came about.”

Bucky goes silent, but Steve knows how to read it now. He hears the unspoken words about night terrors, sweating and vomiting, and slowly piecing a person back together from fragments. Still, there’s something that Bucky said that makes him smile.

Bucky glances at him. “What’re you smilin’ about?”

“Yasha,” Steve replies. “You said he was a skeleton, but he was funny and really kind. All that horrible stuff done to him - to _you_ \- and you were still kind. Talk about a foundation.”

“Oh,” Bucky says softly, “that.” He sighs. “I had to relearn it, you know. Kindness. They definitely weren’t kind to me, and it ain’t a currency they take in Vyborg if you speak certain languages. But I made do.”

Steve isn’t sure what languages he’s referring to. Finnish, maybe, or German.

“After I got my head on straight, I started doing small dreamshare jobs to test myself,” Bucky continues. He speeds up to pass a truck, and his right hand hovers over the gear shift again. Steve grabs his hand to keep it occupied, and Bucky flashes him a smile. “When I didn’t hit the ground every time a bullet was fired and managed to keep my forge through the whole dream, I got the courage to keep going. It’s taken me a year to come to terms with all the shit I did when I was under their control.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Steve says softly.

Bucky looks tired. “I know,” he says. “But when you find out that you’ve killed thirty people who should’ve lived, it takes a while to sink in that you’re not the one to blame. It’s been over a year and half, and I still blame myself - I pulled the trigger, not them.”

Steve doesn’t really know what to say to that.

By the time Bucky’s recounted the jobs he pulled after he escaped, they’ve been driving for two and half hours, and the sun’s breaking through the thick clouds. Steve wishes he had coffee, preferably spiked, even though the alcohol doesn’t do anything to him.

They drive in silence for a while after Bucky’s done telling Steve everything. Then, Bucky looks at him and asks, “What’ve you been up to lately?”

“Uh,” Steve says. “Been depressed, I think.”

It’s not a joke, and Bucky isn’t laughing. “Tell me,” he says and flips the visor down when the sun hits his eyes. He’s beautiful in the late morning light.

Steve does.

\----

“So, what now?” Bucky asks at a gas station in Staten Island, rubbing his empty takeaway cup with his left thumb. In his leather jacket and ridiculous skinny jeans, squinting in the sunshine, he’s the sweetest sight Steve has witnessed since 2011.

“Now?” Steve asks. He chugs the rest of his coffee, tosses the cup into a bin, and checks his watch. They still have five hours before the rendezvous. He feels a lot better now than he did an hour ago in the car, listening to Bucky’s terrible story. “Now, we figure out how to tell the rest of our team who you really are.”

Bucky makes a face at that, and Steve chuckles. He cups his hand around the nape of Bucky’s neck and tugs him closer. Bucky comes willingly. “And after that… Well, I’ve heard Siem Reap is nice this time of the year. Both of us could probably use a holiday and some time to figure out where we stand with each other. A couple of years ago, some poor schmuck made the mistake of agreeing to marry me, and I’d really, really like to know if he still wants to. Because I do.”

Bucky’s mouth curls up into a smile, slow and pleased. It’s familiar, but more so because it’s not fully old Bucky or fully Yasha. It’s like he’s a mixture of the two of them, and Steve loves him impossibly.

“Yeah, punk,” Bucky says. He throws his own cup away, and puts his hands on Steve’s hips. His laughter has a boyish echo, and for a fleeting second he looks like the kid Steve fell in love with fifteen years ago. “Yeah. I think I can work with that.”

“You’d better, jerk. You didn’t crawl up out of the grave just to dump me at a gas station,” Steve replies and tugs him up into a kiss that feels like the last piece of a puzzle, a homecoming.

Bucky kisses him back, mouth opening under his in a way that makes his blood boil. It’s sweet and a little dirty, Bucky arching up against him and humming against his lips.

When they part, Bucky flattens his left hand against Steve’s flank and slides his right hand up Steve’s chest. “You kept these,” he says and touches Steve’s totem with his fingertips. The smirk he gives him is fond. “That’s good. I want the whole fucking world to know that after all these years, you’re still my insufferable, romantic fool.”

Bucky fists his own old dog tags, and uses them to yank Steve back into another kiss, hot and a little possessive. Steve tightens his grip of the back of Bucky’s neck, and Bucky tilts his hips forward to press them against Steve’s in a smooth, delicious roll.

Somebody catcalls them from a passing car, and they pull apart, almost panting.

“Get in the goddamn car,” Steve orders Bucky in a low voice, painfully hard in his khakis. “I’m gonna take you home, bend you over the bed, and see how many times I can make you come in four hours.” He bends to kiss Bucky’s jaw and grins against his ear. “I bet you can still take my cock like a fucking champ, _Sarge_.”

Bucky’s breath hitches satisfyingly, and then he laughs, throaty and breathless. Steve’s never really been one for dirty talk, and he’s almost surprised by his own words. But neither of them are who they were four years ago, and Steve wants desperately to find out if they still slot together as well as they used to.

Steve thinks about the ring he bought on impulse, back in 2011, now hidden in a box in their Brooklyn brownstone. It would probably still fit on Bucky’s right ring finger.

“You bet, _sir_.” Bucky smirks, his eyes dark with desire. He kisses Steve once more for the road and lets go of the chain. The tags clink together against Steve’s chest, and under them Steve’s heart swells like a tidal wave until it fills him up from his toes to his head and pours out of his mouth. Bucky curls his tongue, sweeps it off, and swallows it down. Steve never wants it back.

The ring fits. They’re late for the debrief.

\----

November in Siem Reap is humid, but the rainy season has started to pass. It’s almost exactly the same as it was seven years ago: Steve is sweating like a pig and cursing the weather; Bucky is untroubled and stunning, basking in the heat. He’s wearing a sleeve of synthetic skin to mask his metal arm, courtesy of Tony, and his thick hair is pulled up to get some air on the back of his neck.

They take a tuk-tuk to see the ruins. They give themselves brainfreeze with Blue Pumpkin’s fruit shakes and fro-yo smoothies. They stroll along the canal, have beers in tiny street restaurants, and lounge at the pool.

Bucky spends hours caressing silk scarves at the Artisans of Angkor showroom, while Steve picks up silver boxes shaped like quails and pumpkins and puts them back down again, trying not to stare at Bucky.

Bucky’s always been a tactile guy, mapping the world by touch, and that hasn’t changed. He can’t seem to stop touching everything at the shops, like he’s marveling at the fact that he’s still alive and there to see it.

They’re getting married in Helsinki next month. They’ll tuck themselves away and hibernate there, at the edge of the world, enveloped in the dark, long nights and the short, windy days of the northern winter. Steve can picture them there, huddled in Cafe Regatta’s warmth with hot coffee and warm cinnamon rolls, the frost drawing flowers on the windows. Before that, they’ll drop by Kyoto to see the autumn foliage. But for now, they’re where the sun is, getting used to sleeping next to each other again.

Maybe next spring they’ll find another job. Forgers tend to burn out young, and Steve knows that realistically Bucky doesn’t have many years left until he can’t do it anymore. But for now, they’re content to do nothing on their long-overdue vacation before they make a nest for the winter.

They fuck in their huge, ridiculous hotel bed, relearning every curve and freckle. Bucky’s body feels different under Steve’s hands: he’s all raised scars and colourful ink, lean muscle and gleaming metal, slimmer and yet heavier than he used to be. He gets off on nastier things than he used to and loves the steady stream of filth pouring from Steve’s mouth. But he still takes Steve’s dick like he was born for it, and he’s still bossy as hell.

Steve loves the breathless cursing and constant sass, loves to trace Bucky’s tattoos with his tongue, loves every inch because Bucky’s impossibly alive and beautiful under him.

It’s not perfect; it never was to begin with, and now they have four years of baggage to work around.

Bucky bristles in the crowds at the Old Market. He wakes up some mornings and flinches away from Steve, too accustomed to his own space, and gets frustrated when he thinks Steve is trying to coddle him. He blanks out sometimes because of the smallest, most harmless-seeming things, leaving Steve frustrated and unable to do anything to help.

Bucky’s fucked up from his time with HYDRA, but he’s also fucked up from being another person for the eighteen months after his escape. Sometimes, he can’t make a functioning human being out of all his terrible experiences. Some days, he’s how he was before Moscow. Other days, he’s Yasha again. It’s tiring and a little confusing, but Steve does his best.

But Steve also drops things like “Hey, do you remember that job in Oslo, in 2013?” too easily, not remembering until it’s too late that in reality they weren’t together. In 2013, Bucky was in HYDRA’s hands, and Steve was in Oslo with Clint and Thor, Bucky only a ghost in his head.

Neither of them is the kind of person they hoped to be when they were scrappy kids in Brooklyn; fifteen years of tragedy has fucked them up, and now they clash in ways they didn’t use to.

The crevasses under Bucky’s skin are still there, dark and gaping and out of Steve’s reach. He knows what some of them are, now, but Bucky still keeps secrets, and it still drives Steve mad. They have days when all they do is yell at each other, armed with 25 years’ worth of history.

Sometimes, Steve wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks, _I’m the kind of man who leaves a criminal to die a slow death instead of giving him a fair trial. I’m the kind of man who promoted a useless war and indirectly killed hundreds of young Americans._

When he puts his hand on Bucky’s tattooed hip, he can feel the scars there like they’re his own, and he thinks, _I’m the kind of man who left the only precious thing in his life in the hands of torturers and decided to destroy himself instead._

It’s hard work, being happy, but they are fucking determined to make it work. _I love you_ , they telegraph in every touch, _I love you the best I can, and my god, I hope it will be enough._

Bucky likes to stick his right hand into the crook of Steve’s elbow as they weave between drunk backpackers on Pub Street. He carries Steve’s ring on his finger like a victory, proof that he made it to the other side and back to Steve, changed but alive.

The last time they were in Cambodia, Bucky was twenty-six and ancient like only those who had been to war were. Now he’s thirty-three and ageless like people who have suffered and survived.

Steve is still so in love with him that he feels like he’s splitting at the seams.

He puts his right hand over Bucky’s and squeezes a little, his ring reflecting the red lights hanging over the street. “Hey,” he says, quiet and private in the clamour of the street. “I love you.”

It’s not the first time he’s said it since he got Bucky back, but sometimes it’s a struggle to get it out. There are days when he isn’t sure Bucky wants to hear it, too deep in his ravines.

Today is a better day, though, and Bucky’s smile is soft as he sidesteps another partygoer and presses more closely against Steve’s side. The night is heavy and warm around them, and Steve thinks that he’d be ready to burn the world to the ground if Bucky just asked. That much hasn’t changed.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and he’s smiling, he’s happy, and that’s the only thing that’s ever really mattered. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Älä länkytä, vitun urpo" is Finnish and translates freely to "Don't yap, you fucking moron". 
> 
> [This](https://s3-media2.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/qZ7cY9WP0d_YmL-2MeEsiQ/o.jpg) is Cafe Regatta, which you can find near the Sibelius monument in Helsinki - it's super cute and probably my favourite café in Helsinki. My dad used to have his kayaks in the Merimelojat kayaking club next to it. In late July, the sun sets in Helsinki a bit after 10 p.m.; pulla is Finnish sweet pastry. [Here](https://kohokohdat.fi/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2015/05/turun-saaristo.jpg) is one photo from Turku archipelago. I just spent five days sailing there; it's amazing and I love it to bits.
> 
> If you're interested in codas to this fic, check out the series - the smutty coda is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7553740), the Sam POV epilogue [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7674364), and Bucky-centric prequel [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7779346). I'll possibly write something else in this verse at some point too, but no promises.
> 
> My tumblr is [here](http://rohkeutta.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Thanks to everybody for sticking with me and this ridiculous story! My revisions history showed that I started the doc for this fic 19th June 2015, so it's definitely been a ride. Originally the working name was actually stolen from Dead Poets Society, so let it be with those stolen words that I conclude this weirdo end note: _But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be._


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